This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

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I had to smile though when I updated the app.

Not only did the app’s marketing pic showcase Twitter’s current brand messaging around watching, getting, and reading, all of which are higher on the priority list than, God forbid, actually tweeting, but the app itself is designed for consumption, not creation. Watch the world unfold, indeed, while you consume media.

Here’s the Twitter app user interface (at right). Please tell me, at first glance, where you go to tweet.

I’m not a regular Twitter app user, preferring to simply use the web or a mobile app, and it took me a few seconds to find (it’s that tiny little icon at the bottom left corner).

The big, noticeable icons are all at the the top: my account, my home stream, mentions, messages, and more.

In any case the updates add better multimedia integration — you can click and add photos in multiple ways — and support for retina displays. With a presumably straight face, Twitter says with this update, “Tweets will be clearer and sharper, creating a more vivid experience.”

In addition, the app now supports 14 more languages, including Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.

The update is available in the Mac App Store, where the app has to date received 3.5 stars.

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

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The operating system has topped 3 million App Store downloads since last week’s launch, Apple announced today. This makes it the most successful OS for the Cupertino, Calif. Mac maker’s history. The news comes days after hearing that Mountain Lion represented 3 percent of all Mac Internet traffic, as VentureBeat previously reported.

“Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it the most successful release ever,” said Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Philip Schiller in a statement.

Along with tighter integration with Apple’s iOS, the new OS is tightly tied to Twitter. In today’s announcement, Apple said Facebook integration would come in an “upcoming” software update of Mountain Lion. The OS also includes many features first seen in iOS, like a notification center, built-in social networking support, iMessage, and voice dictation. Today’s announcement only confirms what others were saying after the $20 Mountain Lion upgrade became available: the new OS is on track to be the best version of  OS X, bringing Apple $38 million and climbing in new revenue.

More than 15 months after Apple launched its Mac App Store, the software hub has 10,000 paid and free apps.

The Mac App Store brought the concept of Apple’s iOS App Store to the company’s OS X operating system, but it has attracted far fewer developers than its mobile-focused store. When Mac App Store launched in Jan. 2011, it contained about 1,600 apps and has grown slowly to 10,000. At least the store has attracted nice download numbers: Apple said in December that the store had seen more than 100 million downloads since launch. No doubt that number is significantly higher now.

Comparatively, Apple’s iOS App Store now has more than 600,000 apps and has become the gold standard for mobile software distribution. In second place, Google’s Play store (formerly Android Market) now has more than 400,000 apps for the Android OS.

On a personal note, I’ve only opened the Mac App Store a few times since purchasing a Macbook Air last October. Almost all of the apps I’ve downloaded come from the Web, where developers don’t have to worry about giving Apple a 30 percent cut of the sale.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve used the Mac App Store much and what your favorite current Mac apps are.

via MacGeneration

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Found is a neat new Mac application that wants to be like OS X’s Spotlight, but for all the files you have stored across cloud services, including Dropbox, Google Docs, and Gmail. Currently in beta, Found is aiming for a mid-May release in the Mac App Store, where it will be free.

“We wanted to step back and say, what are some of the basic problems people have had with their search?” said Found co-founder Stephen Brady in an interview. He and his partner, Vijay Sundaram, decided the fragmentation of files across multiple devices and cloud services was a big issue today, one that could be solved with a single application.

The concept is simple: Need to find that photo of your cat wearing a bow tie, but don’t know if it’s in one of your three Gmail accounts, on your desktop, or in a Dropbox folder? Double click the Control button or click on the Found icon (it’s a titled F, not a pink stealth fighter) in the menu bar, and the Found search box will slide out from the left side of your screen. Start typing the name of a file or app (“cat tie”), and the results will appear in real-time, date ordered. You can narrow down the results by including a file extension (“jpg cat tie”). Arrow down and each search result will show as a preview in the middle of your screen. You can tab to jump between sources. When you do locate that photo of your kitty, hit Enter and it should open.

The Found application is in beta, so there are still some kinks to be worked out. Gmail attachments don’t seem to open if you’re logged into a different account in your browser, and it’s not yet as fast as Spotlight for searching your hard drive.

But even in beta, there are some nice touches that reflect smart, careful design and make me optimistic for the final product. For example, you can drag and drop a found file to anywhere else on your computer, including onto an open Gmail message where it will be added as an attachment. What will really make the product a must have is the addition of other services. Brady says he hopes to add support for Evernote, Box, and Salesforce in the near future. If they manage to link it to multiple devices, it would be a killer utility for every person with scattered files.

If you don’t want to wait until May to use the app, you can sign up for an invite for the beta version of Found on the company website.

The company was founded in 2010 by Stephen Brady and Vijay Sundaram, who met while working together at Microsoft. The co-founders are not yet divulging their plans for making money off the application, which will be free and have no ads. The San Francisco-based startup has five employees and has received 1M in seed funding from NEA and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

Retickr is a simple app with a news ticker bar that scrolls headlines across your desktop. You can control what types of news you see, specify RSS feeds from Google Reader, and control the speed of ticker. You can also make the ticker stay on top of all other windows (which can be distracting unless you have a large screen) or you can hide it when you minimize the app.

The colors, orange, black, and navy can be a bit jarring and the app had a hard time pulling the correct thumbnails and titles of the blogs I follow in Google Reader. It seems Retickr works better with the already-available news sources you can choose from when you set it up.

Retickr’s team, co-founders Travis Truett, Brian Trautschold, Adam Haney, and Jared Houghton bootstrapped the business before raising $150,000 in seed money in 2011. The first version of the app was released in August 2011 and faced some mixed reviews from Apple users on the App Store, saying it negatively affected battery life. The company spent the last six months working on improving the app and released 2.0 today.

A search of the Mac App Store reveals that there aren’t many other apps that do what Retickr does. News Ticker for Mac comes close, but just scrolls headlines across your desktop, and it costs 99 cents (Retickr is free for the foreseeable future). No such extension is available for Chrome, and the closest match for Firefox is RSS Ticker, an add-on that displays headlines from your bookmarked sites in your bookmark toolbar.

Now, the company has raised a first round of institutional funding from the same venture capital firm the gave it its seed round, a small incubator in Tennessee called Lamp Post Group. Retickr hopes to use the money to improve upon its product and expand its team.

Retickr is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee and has a team of six employees. It has raised a total of around $1.65 million in funding.

The Mac App Store, which launched January 6, 2011, is an online market place that sells apps for the company’s line of desktop and laptop PCs that run its exclusive OS X operating system. It’s much like the company’s mobile App Store, which sells free and paid apps for iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.

In June, the company announced that its Mac App Store is the number one channel for PC software sales, surpassing big retailers like Best Buy, Walmart and Office Depot. The store has a variety of categories, including education, games, graphics and design, lifestyle, productivity, and utilities. The company also made its latest OS X Lion upgrade exclusively available through the Mac App Store.

It’s certainly an impressive feat for Apple, which previously faced criticism over the store because it ran counter to the long-standing tradition of software companies selling their own wares.

And while the number of downloads is definitely worth noting, there’s also something to be said for the developer community throwing support behind the idea of a desktop application store. Developers can set their own prices for the apps, but have to pay Apple 30 percent of each sale. The developers do not, however, have to pay for hosting, free applications, App Store marketing or credit card fees.

I’ve used the Mac App store twice since it opened. The first time was for Lion, and the second was for a native Twitter app that I’ve probably only used once. I’m curious to find out how many VentureBeat readers have downloaded more than one OS X app from the Mac App Store. (And of the people who have downloaded multiple apps from the store, how often do you use those apps?)

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The Mac App Store allows users to instantly purchase software for their Macs from a single location. It was an attempt by Apple to bring the app purchasing mentality from iOS into the desktop arena, and it looks like that plan was indeed successful.

One success story Apple pointed out was the Mac image editor Pixelmator, which managed to earn $1 million in its first 20 days on the App Store. Autodesk, the company behind the popular 3D design tool AutoCAD, gained 1 million new users thanks to the store. Just like its iOS App Store, Apple takes a 30 percent cut from purchases on the Mac App Store.

I’d still like to see a further breakdown of just how well Apple’s Mac Store is performing. It definitely seems strange that a service only available to Macs could sell more software than established retailers. Then again, Apple could just be counting individual programs sold, and not the total amount it’s making from them.

Distimo counts 1,604 apps in the store (Apple’s press release is not specific, only saying that the number is “more than 1,000”), and as with the iPad and the iPhone, games are the biggest category (more than 15 percent), as you can see in the chart at the end of this post. Games’ dominance is also reflected in the top app charts — the most popular paid app is iPhone game sensation Angry Birds, and there are three other games in the top 10. (The most popular free app is Twitter for Mac.)

However, productivity and utility apps make a much stronger showing on the Mac than they do on other devices, which makes sense, since people presumably do more work on their Macs than on their iPhones. Distimo says productivity apps make up nearly 15 percent of the Mac App Store, compared to less than 5 percent of iPhone and iPad apps.

As for pricing, my own impression suggests that Mac apps are on average cheaper than the desktop software that you’d buy in stores, but more expensive than apps for the iPhone and iPad. Distimo says that in cases where there’s a Mac and iPad version of the app, the pricing is normally the same.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog breaks down the prices into several buckets. (TUAW reports a lower app count, 959, than either Distimo or Apple, perhaps because it uses more complicated methodology for weeding out duplicate apps.) Nearly half the Mac apps fall into the cheapest bucket, between free and $5, but there are also a substantial number between $10 and $50.

Of course, as the app store grows, we can expect these numbers to change. Oh, and if you’re a Mac owner who hasn’t figured out how to install the Mac App Store, you can either check your computer’s available software updates and install the new version of the Mac OS, or you can go here.

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What will be different, though, is that popular social gaming network Game Center will not be a part of the Mac App Store, nor will it support in-app purchases. In-app purchasing means that developers can use the so-called ‘freemium’ model, where an app is initially offered for free and users can buy more features for it later. The 70-30 split is still intact, meaning that developers keep 70% of sales revenue for paid apps.

The mobile version of the App Store has proven to be a very successful distribution channel in terms of providing free and paid apps to pundits the world over. CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release that the company is looking to do the same for desktop apps: “We can’t wait to get started on January 6”, Jobs said.

The apps purchased via the Mac App Store will update automatically and users are free to install the apps on any and all Macs they own. The Mac App Store will be available in 90 countries at launch as a free download through Apple’s Software Update function.

[Photo credit: JP Manninen]

Beta and demo versions won’t be accepted either, Apple announced on its developer news site last night.

“Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore,” the company wrote. “The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.”

It’s a surprising move by Apple given how successful trial apps have been for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Trial versions allow users to test out new games or apps with no commitment to purchase. They also serve as a gateway to paid apps. While it’s not all that difficult for users to download the trial versions from a website instead, it seems like an odd choice for Apple to keep them off the Mac App Store entirely.

The extra steps of going to a website, downloading the software, and installing it, could easily keep some users from experimenting with Mac desktop apps as they have with iPhone OS apps. It seems like a key element of the app store model — which offers consumers a one-stop location to find and purchase new apps. Leaving room for trial versions of apps seems like a given.

Apple announced the Mac App Store in late October at its “Bring Back the Mac” event. The store will be available on the upcoming Mac OS X “Lion” update, and it will also be available on the current “Snow Leopard” OS by the end of January.

Via Apple Insider