The new Apple Mac App Store has arrived today as planned. I was eager to have a good look around it, and this is what I found.
Only some of the applications that I had already installed on my computer from previous independent software purchases are shown as already installed by the Mac App Store. For instance Yojimbo from Barebones and Coda from Panic show as installed, but Marsedit 3 from red sweater and Pixelmator do not.
The apps that I have previously purchased outside of the Mac App Store and that show as installed, do not show me price that they now cost on the new store. I guess I do not need to know how much they cost if I have already purchased them but what If someone says “that’s a great bit of software how much does it cost?”
The apps that I have previously purchased outside of the Mac App Store do not show in the purchases section of the store. I can see that that is because I have not actually purchased them from the store but it would have been nice if they had showed up so I could take advantage of the update system that the new store should offer.
Because of the above point it would seem that a copy of iLife 11 already owned from the purchase of a new system can only be used on that system, but if a copy of an app that makes up iLife like iPhoto is purchased in the Mac App Store it can be used on multiple systems.
Purchasing a free app such as Textwrangler from Barebones Software via the Mac App Store, allows the app to show in the Purchases section, and overwrites the existing install with no problems.
I have an old netbook it is an Acer Aspire One if you are interested in these sort of things like me it is the 8.9″ 110 model that shipped with an 8GB SSD drive installed with Linpus Linux. If you have ever seen one of these run you will understand why this post exists, it is slow, very slow even running it’s original cut down linux distribution. Although it has Open Office, Firefox, email and a number of other useful apps, trying to use it as I intended was just not happening. Anyway new computers have arrived since then in particular an iPad. I would quote Steve Jobs if I could remember what he said about netbooks at the launch of the iPad, It was not very nice something about them being rubbish. And before you say it yes I know he has now backtracked and released a netbook in the form of the MacBook Air 11″. One more thing that you don’t really need to know is that the battery on my Acer is past it so it really needs to be plugged in to the AC to run for more than 5 minutes. This leaves me with a fairly useless computer, that I don’t want to throw away mainly because it looks ok, I got the white one because it was the nearest thing to an Apple netbook at the time. I have been looking for and experimenting with alternative uses for it for some time now, various versions of linux in the hope it would speed up, using it has a LAMP server with no GUI was the best result so far, but thats another story.
I have also been looking at Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba mainly because a trial came on a magazine cover disc. In a nutshell this software allows you to capture the audio from an application on your computer and transmit it to another piece of software called Airfoil Speakers that can be installed on a variety of devices. I did this with Airfoil running on my iMac and transmitting iTunes music to my iPhone 3GS. Because of the multitasking in iOS4 you can leave the Airfoil speakers app once it is running and open the Apple Remote app which allows you to control the music that is playing in iTunes and therefore the music that is being sent from Airfoil to the Airfoil Speakers app. This is great, well it is until you put your iPhone into a speaker dock or hook it up to a stereo to listen to the music, at which point you have to stand up and walk across the room to use the remote. Simple answer use another iOS device to act as the remote, but remember that slow old Acer.
So it began, I had a copy of Ubuntu Netbook Edition already on a USB pen drive so I decided to use that. The reasoning behind this was mostly because I had the software downloaded and converted into a bootable USB pen drive. Which is a bit of a time consuming task especially when doing it on a mac, as it involves messing around in terminal and stuff that I have to look up on the web to remember what to do. I was also counting on the fact that Ubuntu is pretty popular at the moment so the chances of it working were perhaps higher than for other distributions, and if it did not work the chances of finding an answer on the web was also high. I also had spotted that I could download the Airfoil Speaker application in .deb Debian software package format. The pen drive was quickly inserted and booting the netbook into the live / run off the stick version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10. I decided to go for the install option rather than running off the stick as I thought it might be faster, it certainly could not be any slower and I did not want a USB stick sticking out of the side. With the install completed, the WiFi configured and auto updates installed the system was ready for use. If anyone is interested in running Ubuntu on an Acer Aspire One the good news is it seems to install ok with sound and WiFi working with no tinkering necessary, the bad news is it is incredibly slow, I would say unusably so. As all I wanted to run was Airfoil Speakers I continued and downloaded the application in the Debian software package format from Rogue Amoeba. Ubuntu offered to install the package for me and I accepted, so far so good. After installation was complete, I found the application icon in the applications folder from the menu on the desktop and ran it. The application opened and all looked good on the netbook, whilst on my iMac the new device was listed along with my iPhone as being available to transmit the audio to. I selected the netbook from the imac and clicked to transmit, the Airfoil speakers app on Ubuntu crashed!
I should have guessed this was going to happen, my past experiences with Linux have taught me that things rarely go as smoothly as you might wish for. Not wanting to be beaten by a computer I set about googling for an answer, with the hope that one of my reasons for opting for Ubuntu would pay off. After a little bit of research it appeared that the answer was to copy some .dll files from a Microsoft Windows installation of Airfoil Speakers into the linux installation. Without getting too technical because I can’t, the problem seems to be an incompatibility with more recent versions of Mono that are installed on linux to allow applications written using the Windows .net framework to be ported to the Linux platform. As I am no fan of Windows the last thing I wanted to do was to install Airfoil Speakers for windows to obtain the files. Luckily some of the answers that I found on the web also included links to the files from the Windows installation. I found several of these links and they include various numbers of files so to begin with I opted to change the fewest number of files and found one download that contained the following 4 files.
- mAlac.dll
- Microsoft.DirectX.DirectSound.dll
- Microsoft.DirectX.dll
- ZeroconfService.dll
I copied these files as suggested into /usr/lib/airfoilspeakers, ran the application and tried to connect again. Success this time the Airfoil Speakers did not crash, and received the audio from my iMac.
