Mac App Store and Curio

As I'm sure you've heard by now, Apple is introducing the Mac App Store early next year. You'll be able to download it for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) and it will come bundled with Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) when it's released in the summer.

Like the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store will be a huge boon to Mac users. A wonderful showcase of high quality Mac software where, with just a single click, you can purchase, download, and install an application. No license keys to worry about, and easy notification and installation of updates. Ah, bliss.

Zengobi is incredibly, incredibly excited about the Mac App Store.

There are still some questions we have like support for cross-grading (Standard to Pro, for example -- perhaps support for in-app purchasing is the answer?) and for discounted major version upgrades. But I'm sure those will get worked out either before the release or soon thereafter.

We're diving in head-first to see what we need to do to work with Apple's various restrictions for App Store inclusion. This will be an interesting learning experience.

The current system will remain in-place, of course. We'll still maintain our website and Kagi storefront as this is the best way to provide information about our products, and support volume purchases, academic discounts, and trial downloads. And there are millions of Mac users not on Snow Leopard so the Mac App Store isn't available to them anyway.

We'll also need to support two nearly identical sets of distribution binaries since existing customers will need update checks, license keys, etc. It could be that Apple has a plan to migrate an existing install base to App Store binaries but we'll learn that as we move forward. (iTunes promo codes to assist in the migration? Those would only work in the U.S.)

It's certainly a brand new and very exciting development so we're eager to jump in and learn more!