As many of you guys know, the Mac OS X 10.6.6 came out yesterday. The update brings some bug fixes, but most importantly the Mac App Store. The Mac App Store is Apple’s way of distributing applications in a simple UI — just like the Ubuntu Software Center. After playing around with the Mac App Store, I have to say, it’s really nice!

The UI

When you first launch the App Store, UI  is very elegant and nicely laid out. The top has your basic shortcut buttons to featured items, categories, updates, etc. On the left, you have your account settings, and under that, you have your top paid and free apps.

The UI is very similar to the iPad UI — maybe a bit too similar. The only differences I see is that there’s no Genius feature built-in. Maybe later implementations of the Mac App Store will have that feature.

How it works

The way how you download apps is just like on your iOS device: typing in your username and password, and wait for download. The nice thing about the Mac App Store is that you can use your iTunes money to download applications. Here’s a feature for people with more than one Mac: re downloading apps. This is really convenient for people who has more than one Mac, or when buying a new Mac.

The Apps

Currently, there are 1,000+ apps in the Mac App Store with one million downloads, which is quite impressive for first day launch. Just like the App Store for iOS, developers have to deal Apple’s approval process and developers only gets 70% of the revenue. What’s interesting is that with some applications like Aperture, the app is significantly cheaper than getting it from the Apple Store. That’s basically saying that it costs Apple $100+ for packaging? (Just kiddin’ )

The thing I’m scared about is remember what happened on the iOS devices? People are able to run official iOS applications without paying nothing. With the help of software that can crack the application automatically or prepackaged right now, you can download and install any application without logging into your iTunes account. Completely illegal of a process, but will we be seeing this same thing coming to the Mac? We have to wait and see.

Apps that I recommend

Come on, Angry Birds on a Mac? Heck yeah! The way how you control Angry Birds is by using the multitouch trackpad on your MacBook, or your Magic Trackpad. If you don’t have either one of those, you can use the mouse, which isn’t the best way to play this game.

Remember Tweetie? If you do, you’ll feel right at home. The Twitter application is actually Tweetie 2.0, but renamed for obvious reasons. This is currently my favorite Twitter client because of it’s slick UI and the integration with Growl. Before you download this app, you should check out Taylor’s review. By the way, this app is free!

Yes, I know the name is weird (and reminds me of someone), but this is actually an excellent app! It’s essentially Spotlight, but in turbo mode. You can set Alfred to search on the web, calculate math equations, and look words up in the dictionary.