Apple Launches ITunes App Store With 500+ Apps 121
L. Miriam writes "Apple launched the iTunes App store for the iPhone and iPod Touch today, following the earlier launch of iTunes 7.7. There are over 500 applications available for download, with prices ranging from free to around $35. Both MySpace and Facebook apps are there, as well as a mix of games, utilities and ebooks. You can download applications now, but you can't do anything with them until the iPhone/iPod 2.0 firmware is released. The App Store can't be accessed directly through iTunes, but Mobile Computer explains how to get to it, and has a few screenshots, too."
You can access it directly within iTunes. (Score:5, Informative)
There's a section in Preferences -> General which controls which categories you have on the panel on the left. One of those available to display now is "Applications" which will happily take you to that section of the iTunes Store.
Re:Direct link to the App Store (Score:2, Informative)
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewGenre?id=36&mt=8 [apple.com]
Warning: Don't click "Buy" if you use ShoppingCart (Score:5, Informative)
There are normally two ways to shop using the iTunes store 1) with 1-click "buy it now", which is the default, and 2) with a shopping cart, which lets you queue items and decide which to buy later.
Just a warning: App Store does NOT respect the shopping cart setting. If you login to download some free apps and accidentally click "Buy" on a non-free app, YOU WILL BE CHARGED IMMEDIATELY
Hopefully they fix this before tomorrow at 8am.
Re:"500" (Score:3, Informative)
It also includes the doubling up of the free apps -- poking around, it looks like almost half of them are "free" demos, and there's a second premium app you have to buy.
Re:That would be this... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh and direct link since I'm a whore: http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone/061-4955.20080710.bgt53/iPhone1,2_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw [edgesuite.net]
Re:where's the remote desktop or vnc app? or hell, (Score:4, Informative)
VNC perhaps, but there's a bunch of handy apps (AFPd, SSH server, SSH client, shell access) that are against the terms of the SDK license agreement. Its legal not technical limitations.
Thankfully 2.0 can still be un-crippled and the Installer.app managed versions of those apps will be usable.
Re:"500" (Score:5, Informative)
The 500+ figure includes each e-book as a separate "app", but still there's a pretty good showing with much more to come. A lot of it is free or very cheap.
It also includes the doubling up of the free apps -- poking around, it looks like almost half of them are "free" demos, and there's a second premium app you have to buy.
It also includes some pretty crappy apps that surprisingly made the launch day cut [arstechnica.com]: "seven tip calculators, three flashlight applications, nine Bible-related entries, two Zen garden applications, five blackjack games, and almost 10 percent of the entries are ebooks. There is an application to simulate the playing of a tiny violin to console your friends, a Light Saber emulator, an application that gives you a cartoon eye, and two applications that simulate the look of a beer mug."
A $0.99 "flashlight" app that does nothing but turn the screen white seems like a dubious inclusion in the "500+" claim. Others [cnet.com] include a $2.99 app called "Looky" that provides Google Suggest capability, which Google provides for free [blogspot.com]. My favorite is "Hold On!", which records how long you can hold your finger on an on-screen button (with "records").
As for the "doubling up of the free apps," I see more free "ad-supported" versions than "demos." Double-counting "demos" would be really obnoxious, but fully-functional ad-supported versions are less so, IMO. One nice-looking example for Flickr users: Exposure [connectedflow.com] (free ad-supported, $9.99 w/o ads), a Flickr browser that has a "Near Me" feature which uses the iPhone's location capabilities (including 1st-gen iPhones) to browse photos near you.