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One Million Apps Downloaded From the Mac App Store on the First Day  →

Sounds like a hit. Evernote, for example, saw an 1,800% increase in their new-user sign-up rate.

But I wonder what the category and pricing breakdown is for those 1,000,000 downloads? How many were free apps that people downloaded for fun to see how things work? How many downloads were popular iOS games that have been ported and are less than $5? How many were $20 and over apps that were new to the person downloading?

One Million Apps Downloaded From the Mac App Store on the First Day

URL Design  →

Great article by Kyle Neath on the importance of human-friendly URL design. He’s primarily talking about usability and longevity of the URL structure as it relates to web apps, his underlying point is relevant for all types of web sites.

Two years ago I modified all the permalinks. For the first 18 months, each permalink had a simple “…/year/article-name/” structure. Such as:

https://shawnblanc.net/2010/great-french-press-coffee/

I remember purposefully setting them up that way in order to keep the URLs as short and sweet as possible. However, when I read other weblogs I often glance at the URL to reference when the post was published. And I felt that having my posts linked by their year of publication alone left a bit to be desired.

Because, comparing two articles — one written on December 31, 2008 and the other on January 1, 2009 — it may seem as if they were written an entire year apart, instead of one day. And similarly, two posts — one written January 1, 2008 and the other on December 31, 2008 — may seem chronologically near, but are actually not.

Which is why, in 2009, I changed the permalinks to look like this:

https://shawnblanc.net/2010/12/great-french-press-coffee/

By adding the month of publication to the URL it is still short, and there is now an added reference to aid the savvy reader. Additionally, the new permalink structure is a three-in-one tool for reading. You can peel back the layers of the URL to dig deeper into this site.

If you delete the article name from the URL you will find yourself at the archive listing for the year and month of that article’s publication date. If you then delete the month from the URL you get the archive listing for the whole year.

Ian Hines has really put some thought into the URL structure of his weblog and has done something quite clever. Using a vanity URL and adjusting the slug of each category his URLs literally read like a sentence containing subject, verb, and object in that order:

[http://ianhin.es/wrote-about/designing-urls-for-humans](http://ianhin.es/wrote-about/designing-urls-for-humans)

URL Design

Apps You Already Own May Show Up as Installed in the Mac App Store  →

From the desk of Cabel Sasser, regarding Transmit, Coda, and Unison in the Mac App Store:

The Mac App Store may show software bought from us previously as “Installed”, even though they’re two different licenses. You will not get Mac App Store auto-updates unless you purchase from the Mac App Store. To re-enable the “Purchase” button in the Mac App Store, just drag the app to the trash. Your preferences/sites will not be affected.

So the App Store recognizes that you already own the app, but it doesn’t treat it as if you bought it from the App Store. Meaning, on the App’s page within the App Store you’ll see “Installed” instead of the purchase price. However, you won’t see it in your list of apps underneath the “Purchases” tab and you won’t get updates for that app via the Mac App Store.

The Mac App Store won’t let you buy apps that are already “Installed”. According to Cabel, if you want to purchase an app through the Mac App Store that you already own, you have to drag your current app into the trash.

Update: According the Daniel Jalkut (MardEdit maestro), apps you already own will only show up as “Installed” in the Mac App Store if the developer used the exact same Bundle ID in the App Store as with the self-sold app you bought.

Apps You Already Own May Show Up as Installed in the Mac App Store

The Mac App Store Launches Today  →

Today is a big day for the Mac community. For one, 3rd-party developers are getting a huge open door to new markets they’ve never been able to reach before. Users will be getting a whole new window to discover software they never before knew about. Also, users are getting a simplified way to install and manage their applications.

10.6.6 is now available as a software update and with it comes the Mac App Store. It’s always a good idea to backup you Mac before installing major software updates, so you may want to do that now while you’ve got time (if you didn’t already backup last night).

I’ll be online all day today posting links and articles here, as well as thoughts on Twitter.

The Mac App Store Launches Today