Opinion: Will Apple's App Store change the desktop app market?

There's no doubt that Apple Inc.'s iPhone has changed the landscape of the smart-phone industry, and indeed the mobile phone business as a whole. But one of the most revolutionary advances that Apple offered up isn't in the iPhone itself: It's the mechanism the company developed to distribute non-Apple applications to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Third-party development for mobile devices and smart phones was already happening well over a decade before the iPhone's mid-2007 launch. Palm, Microsoft and Research In Motion all allowed other companies to develop software for their devices, but they left it up to those third-party developers to market their creations -- and forced users to find, purchase, download and install them on their own.

In many ways, this model was no different from the one used by PC makers (including both Apple and Microsoft Corp.) to enable developers to create software and sell it through the same retail channels as the computers themselves. But software for mobile devices evolved in a smaller niche market, one with a more diverse range of platforms that was better suited to online purchasing. The result was often chaos. Users didn't know where to go to find applications, and in some cases, they didn't know how to properly install or remove the applications they had bought.

The App Store 'a radical shift'

Apple's decision to develop a new model -- its App Store -- marked a radical shift for developers and users in mobile software distribution. For developers, the App Store represented a one-stop solution for getting their creations into the hands of users. Apple leveraged its existing iTunes infrastructure for selling music and movies to make apps available to users, handle transactions, prevent piracy by tying purchases to an iTunes account, and offer some measure of marketing and management of customer reviews.

Once the App Store opened last July, developers didn't need to worry about traditional retail channels, setting up a Web site to host downloads or figuring out how they would get paid. (Apple skims 30% off the top; developers keep the rest. ) Not only did this drastically simplify the overhead for developers in distributing their apps, it also leveled the playing field between small developers -- maybe just one person working on a single product -- and large corporate developers.

For users, the App Store has been even more revolutionary -- and popular. By December, it had already distributed 300 million application downloads and was cranking out 2.2 million a day from a one-stop smorgasbord of applications. Buyers can browse categories, see what's new or popular, read reviews, check out screenshots, and search for specific applications by name or function. On top of that, buyers could do all that searching and evaluating on their computers or directly from an iPhone/iPod Touch.

Continues : http://www.computerworld.com/

Microsoft Quickly Looking Past Vista

Windows Vista hasn't even spent two years in stores -- that anniversary arrives tomorrow. But Microsoft is trying to put that operating system in its rearview mirror.

Three weeks ago, the company invited users to preview Vista's replacement, Windows 7. Microsoft hasn't tried to move from one consumer operating system to another this fast since it shipped Windows XP barely a year after the snakebit Windows Millennium Edition.

But Windows 7 -- expect it to ship late this year or early next year -- represents much less of a change than XP. The beta-test release (available through Feb. 10 at http://microsoft.com/windows7) shows a focus on performance fixes, coupled with changes to a few long-settled parts of Windows' interface and extra networking options.

In other words, it's a more efficient, better looking Windows. But it's still Windows.

Merely installing 7 should make that clear. On a Dell laptop running Vista's Home Premium version, an upgrade to 7 took about two hours and three restarts.

Installing Windows 7 from scratch (once inside the Parallels Desktop program on a Mac laptop, once using Apple's Boot Camp software on the same Mac) took only a half-hour, but few users will want to wipe out an existing Windows installation to load 7.

Windows 7's biggest improvement is a reduced appetite for memory. That Dell exhausted almost half of its 2 gigabytes of memory just booting up Vista and a few start-up applications; in 7, it still had almost three-quarters of its memory free. Windows 7 also went to sleep and woke up a second or two faster than Vista, although it took slightly longer to boot up and shut down on that machine.

But Microsoft's pledges of better battery life weren't backed up by a test of DVD playback on the Dell.

Windows 7's most obvious improvement lies at the bottom of the screen, where the task bar gets its first major rewrite since its debut in Windows 95. Instead of rectangular shortcuts to active applications or windows, this strip presents open applications, plus favorites "pinned" to the taskbar, as square tiles labeled with program icons.

Resting the cursor over each tile will bring up live previews of any windows open in an application -- you can even watch a movie play in this thumbnail. A right-click flips up a "jump list" of recent documents and, in some cases, important commands.

If all that sounds like Mac OS X's Dock, it should.

In 7, the "tray," that dumping ground of random icons at the far right of the taskbar, has been swept clean of third-party programs. But you may still need to tell 7 to hide other shortcuts after they pop up there.

Source : http://www.washingtonpost.com/