Technical information

Page 17
by Matt Neuburg
In “Appalicious Makes the Mac App Store Useful,” 1 Septem-
ber 2011, I described ProVUE’s clever application Appalicious, which
presents information from the Mac App Store far more helpfully,
neatly, and completely than Apple’s own App Store application. Now,
in response to threatened legal action, Appalicious has changed its
name to Appcuity, and its Web site has been renamed (and help-
fully reorganized). In addition, ProVUE has taken this opportunity to
implement some feature improvements.
The Appcuity database now tracks Apple’s Top Charts rankings,
based on download counts for free apps and gross sales for paid
apps, to form a new statistic called Rank. App ranks are displayed
as a column of numbers in the Appcuity main window, along with
historical information such as the highest rank a given app has ever
achieved, plus a more extended history in the app’s detail window,
so you can see how an app changes rank over time.
Equally intriguing are changes to Appcuity’s pricing model. (Dis-
claimer: Some of these changes may have been implemented in
response to my suggestions.)
Previously, if you didn’t purchase a subscription or extend your
subscription through recommendations to a friend, Appalicious even-
tually stopped updating its data from the online master database.
Now, Appcuity keeps working even without a subscription, updating
itself from the master database once a week. At this level (called
Appcuity Lite), some customization features and certain column and
history displays are disabled. Thus, there is no serious reason why
you shouldn’t try Appcuity and keep using it for as long as you like,
for free; even at this Lite level, Appcuity will still be more informative
than Apple’s App Store application.
In addition to one-year and two-year subscriptions, the paid ver-
sion of Appcuity (now termed Appcuity Pro) is now available through
a one-time permanent license payment of $21.99, in effect bypassing
the subscription model altogether.
ProVUE requests that existing Appalicious users download Appcu-
ity promptly, as the online database will soon cease accepting data
update requests from copies of Appalicious. The switch to Appcuity
is completely transparent; your Appalicious subscription is turned
into an Appcuity subscription automatically, behind the scenes. I
downloaded Appcuity and launched it, and it immediately displayed
my existing Appalicious data and then updated that data based on
my existing subscription, just as if Appcuity and Appalicious were the
same application; since this was the same machine, I didn’t even
need to re-enter my license information.
Appcuity is a 27.6 MB download. It requires a Mac that can
access the Mac App Store (meaning Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later). New
users automatically experience Appcuity as Appcuity Pro for a week;
after that, it becomes Appcuity Lite unless you buy a Pro subscription
or get a friend to try Appcuity.
[
TidBITS 14 Nov 2011]
Appcuity is the New, Bet-
ter Appalicious