In a way, the “September 2011” Apple is both identical and different from the company we were covering last year. New Macs come with trackpads specifically geared towards Lion’ multi-touch support, and the new Sandy Bridge CPUs by Intel make the process of booting a Mac, and even switching between applications faster than ever. Since September 2010, Apple has updated all its Mac models (except the Mac Pro) and discontinued the white MacBook, the most obvious victim of Apple’s new crown jewel – the MacBook Air. Lion has spawned a new breed of Mac software that it’s just starting to leave a sign in the average consumers’ minds, who are increasingly demanding and looking forward to applications that have been properly enhanced for Lion.Īnd last, there are new Macs in Apple’s line-up. Lion has enabled Apple to bring new features to the Mac App Store such as delta updates for apps and in-app purchases, not to mention the fact that all new Macs sold since July 20 have Lion pre-installed, and thus the Mac App Store. At a developer level, Lion is allowing Objective-C coders and OS X designers to come up with new solutions that take advantage of Apple’s latest technologies such as natural scrolling, push notifications, popover controls, full-screen mode, and Versions. Originally previewed at the “Back to the Mac” event in October 2010, Lion was publicly released in late July after a round of betas that started becoming available to Mac developers since February.

But the Mac App Store’s release leads to another change happened in the last 12 months, and that’s Lion. The Mac App Store comes built into Snow Leopard since version 10.6.6, and over the past months we’ve taken a look at different numbers and stats showing how Apple’s youngest storefront is set to fundamentally revolutionize app distribution on desktop computers.

For one, Mac apps can now be distributed through the Mac App Store, which has proven to be a feasible and reliable platform for developers to showcase their apps to OS X users. One year after my “Must Have 25 Mac Apps” article, I believe it’s time to revisit that list of software I said I would install every time on a new Mac.Ī lot of things have changed since September 2010.

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