What's right with the Mac App Store

For all the things wrong with the Mac App Store, ScreenFloat is example of something right with it. ScreenFloat ($8) is a super handy app that lets you hover screen shots over other windows.1

Bringing low-cost online

Some applications—though awesome—just aren’t worth more than, say, $10, to users. Before the Mac App Store, these applications usually wouldn’t happen—unless there was enough of an open source movement behind them. Or maybe there was some super philanthropic developer that gave them away for free. Even then, they were hard to find.

Crazy talk alert. You’d never know it by looking at the web’s landscape today, but in a normal economy, people are willing to give up money for things they value. And producers of valuable things typically want to receive money for what they make. I’m being totally serious, kids; that’s how things happened before the freemium boom.

The Mac App Store—though flawed in many ways—makes this low-cost class of applications possible by providing an efficient “match making” system that brings users and developers together in great enough numbers to make making cheap apps worthwhile.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start—a working model.

My bottom line, their bottom line

I don’t mind paying for things that are useful. In fact, I would like to do more of it. And I would like to see more makers of valuable things get compensated for their effort.

Any system that greases the economic wheels of software innovation is a win to me.