Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s iOS App Store has been a huge success since it first launched in July of 2008, with billions of downloads occurring over the past three years. So naturally, Apple decided to recycle the model for software built for its Mac OSX desktop platform, launching its own App Store in January of this year.

It’s doing well, to say the least. Apple announced on Monday over 100 million Mac apps have been downloaded since the Mac App Store debuted nearly one year ago.

“In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,”Apple SVP Phil Schiller said in a statement.

The Mac App Store, a feature of OS X Lion, is structured similarly to Apple’s well-known iOS App Store. The iOS App Store has seen over 18 billion downloads and houses more than half a million apps. The Mac App Store is home to “thousands of apps” including things like Photoshop Elements and products from Autodesk.

The 100 million downloads figure only reflects individual app purchases. It does not include sales of OS X Lion or updates to apps purchased from the Mac App Store.

As Apple’s success with the app store model has grown, others have followed suit with their own versions. Last week Microsoft detailed its Windows Store, Microsoft’s marketplace for Windows 8 desktop and tablet applications. Although its policies and pricing scheme differs from that of Apple, it’s clear where the inspiration for the store stemmed from. Microsoft, however, boasts a much larger user base compared to Apple’s, with 500 million Windows 7 users worldwide compared to approximately 30 million Mac users.

With those sorts of numbers, it’s possible that Microsoft’s Windows Store could eventually prove to be more successful than Apple’s. But for now, Apple’s success in the app store arena is the one to beat.

Track your food and share the pictures. Just like Twitter, only people actually care

You know how people are always posting pictures of their meals on Twitter? Well, now there’s a (proper) app for that. It’s called Eatery, and it’s like a cross between Foursquare and Instagram, for food.

There are other apps for tracking your calorie intake, and that’s not really what Eatery is for. It works like this: You snap a photo of your latest snack, dinner or drink and rate its healthiness by dragging a slider. Zero stars for a deep-fried Mars Bar and 11 stars for a plate of celery, for instance.

And that’s it. Your pictures are shared friends who are following you, and they can rate an comment on your dietary choices. The app does most of the work behind the scenes, remembering when and where you ate, and then showing it all on handy graphs. You can see all of the dishes you ate at your pizza place, for instance, or see just how healthily you have been eating for the last week.

You can even while away some time rating photos other people have snapped, kind of like an anonymous Hot or Not. For food.

My only complaint is that you have to connect to Facebook to use the social aspects. Still, I’ll try it out for a week and see if I lose any weight. I have a feeling that posting a photo half a bottle of whisky every night might guilt me into drinking a little less, at least.

The Eatery is available now for the iPhone, and is free.

The Eatery [Massive Health]

The Xbox Kinect is Microsoft’s big push into motion-controlled gaming. You don’t even need a controller to play. Just move your hands and feet with gestures that the Kinect understands, and — voilà! — you’re kicking footballs, competing in dance challenges, and shooting down bad guys.

But now, one year since its launch, the Kinect has gone way beyond video games. It could change our retail buying experiences, and reinvent the way we shop.

A commercial version of the Kinect software development kit will be made available in early 2012, Microsoft announced on Monday, opening the door for businesses to create new applications for the popular platform.

“With the Kinect for Windows commercial program, Microsoft hopes that visionaries all over the globe will continue to transform the way we do things with new Kinect-enabled tools,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Wired.com in a statement. Microsoft is currently running a pilot program with more than 200 businesses across more than 20 countries, including partners like Toyota, textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and digital advertising agency Razorfish.

If all goes as planned, we could see Kinect-based interactions show up at retailers, banks, automotive dealers and other commercial environments. Razorfish, for example, is looking at building kiosks in which customers’ bodies would be scanned in order to try on digital outfits without needing to take off any clothes — so said Razorfish VP of emerging tech Jonathan Hull in an interview with Kotaku. Other applications could include simpler tasks, such as waving one’s hands to navigate an ATM’s menu screens.

Microsoft previously released a non-commercial version of its Kinect SDK in June, encouraging hackers and open software enthusiasts to create off-beat, innovative applications that take advantage of the platform’s motion-sensing capabilities. From gimmicky motion controls for banking software to NSF grant-backed medical research, the non-commercial SDK spurred creative uses of the platform beyond what Microsoft expected.

Kinect first debuted in November of 2010 to much fanfare. The system eschews the traditional button-and-joystick controller scheme, and instead lets users navigate and play games via hands-free motion capture. The system was an instant hit, setting a Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling consumer device ever in the first few days after its release. In March, Microsoft announced it had sold more than 10 million Kinect devices.

Though the hands-free controller has been a fun novelty for gaming enthusiasts, the Kinect’s utility for hardware-modding enthusiasts has been more compelling. The Xbox peripheral is packed with a bevy of sophisticated motion-capturing instruments, including an infrared light emitter to capture the surfaces of items in a room, and a depth camera that builds a 3D model of all the objects captured by infrared.

The Kinect’s relatively low $150 price tag has been even more attractive for budding DIY-ers. Willow Garage — the Silicon Valley robotics outfit known for its robot control operating system — now offers a $500 open-source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. The company’s previous version (also pre-Kinect) cost $280,000.

The initial forays into Kinect modification began with the homebrew modding community, spurring a wave of creative software hacks that ranged from Street Fighter games to the intricacies of “boob physics.” (Yes, really.)

Instead of taking action against the hackers or trying to bar hardware nerds from further Kinect mods, Microsoft encouraged development, promising to eventually release SDKs to new segments of would-be Kinect hackers. “Kinect represents the first incarnation of the next big thing in computing — a world where computing is becoming more natural and intuitive,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg Businessweek in a statement.

Kinect’s natural progression is to move into the commercial realm. Much like app developers for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, the release of the commercial SDK allows third parties to use Microsoft’s technology in bolstering their own brands and services. Partners, however, would use Microsoft’s hardware to augment their own businesses — this rather than providing content to a centralized store. In return, Microsoft would open itself up to untold numbers of potential new hardware purchasing partners.

David Dennis, group program manager of Microsoft’s Xbox team, told Kotaku that Kinect devices could be sold in bulk numbers — the “tens of thousands” — to partner businesses.

Microsoft hasn’t released any hard details on the commercial SDK’s release date beyond “early next year.” So don’t expect to start waving on digital fashion accessories right away.

Dark Sky, an ‘accurate short-term weather predictor’

Dark Sky is a weather app that only tells you what will happen in the next hour, at most. What’s the point of that, you ask? Because by limiting itself to what will happen next, Dark Sky can be spookily accurate.

The app, by Adam Grossman and Jack Turner, analyses weather radar data and tells you exactly what is about to happen in the weather, exactly where you are. Thus you can see that you have five minutes before a downpour, giving you enough time to get to the corner store. And that the shower will last ten minutes, so you should buy a magazine while you’re at the store and wait it out.

This works because it’s way easier to tell which way a storm or weather system will move in the next half hour than it is to predict even tomorrow’s weather. And Dark Sky even looks good while it does it. The same algorithm that predicts the weather also interpolates the herky-jerky radar images into a smoothly animated picture of the weather. It’s kind of like an iTunes visualizer, only useful.

Adam and Jack are currently seeking finding on Kickstarter ($15 will pre-order you a copy), as the app backend requires lots of server power to crunch the radar data from the whole country. This also means that an international rollout might take a while. However, if you live in England I can offer you a very accurate prediction: If it is not raining right now, it will start in five minutes. You’re welcome.

Dark Sky project page [Kickstarter. Thanks, Adam!]

See Also:

• Weddar Report: iPhone App Is Twitter for Weather
• Video: iPad Weather App Gets Hardcore
• Weather Pro: Full-On Meteorology App for iPhone

Newsstand, a new feature of iOS 5, is hitting it big with traditional media publishers thanks to its windfall delivery of new digital subscriptions.

Newsstand appears as a folder on the iOS home screen, funneling all your digital magazine and newspaper app subscriptions into a single location. It provides easy access to these apps, automatically updates them in the background when new issues are released, and — here’s the payoff — includes a built-in store for purchasing subscriptions. Purchased titles are displayed individually on Newsstand’s virtual bookshelf.

“Apple Newsstand is changing the way people buy and read magazines, similar to how people bought and listened to music through iTunes. It’s revolutionary,” says Collin Willardson, director of digital marketing at PixelMags, a digital publishing platform for a number of high-profile media brands, including Esquire, Dwell, Men’s Health and Cosmopolitan.

Numerous publishers are reporting subscription surges for their newspaper and magazine apps. PixelMags reported a 1,150 percent growth increase in the first week after Newsstand and iOS 5 debuted on Oct. 12. It’s now sold over four million digital magazines.

“We quickly started to realize just how big of an impact Apple Newsstand was having on our business when on the morning after launch, I received a phone call from our server company wondering if we were under attack,” said Ryan Marquis, PixelMags’ founder and COO, in a company’s press release. “I told them that we were for sure — from all the new iOS 5 users who wanted to download magazines from us.”

Conde Nast, Wired’s parent company, saw a 268 percent spike in subscriptions since the Newsstand app landed. “It’s clear that the focused attention and greater discoverability that Newsstand provides our brands has been embraced by the consumer,” said Monica Ray, Executive Vice President of Conde Nast.

Without a doubt, Newsstand increases the visibility of subscription-based magazine and newspaper apps, which often get buried under the onslaught of games, social media and photo apps that tend to dominate the App Store’s charts. But thanks to Newsstand, it seems, the National Geographic iPad app managed to reach the #18 spot in the Free Apps chart last week. The New York Times iPhone app is #27 today. And with a button that takes you directly to the magazine and newspaper section of the App Store, the Newsstand app makes it easy to snatch up subscriptions to quickly fill its own empty shelves.

Other success stories: New York Times app subscriptions absolutely soared after Newsstand launched. Its iPad app alone saw 189,000 new user downloads, seven times the number from the week before (27,000). The New York Times saw even more remarkable numbers for its iPhone app: 1.8 million downloads, or 85 times more downloads than the 21,000 of the week before. Meanwhile, Future Plc, a UK-based publisher of niche consumer-enthusiast magazines, saw a 750 percent increase in sales after Newsstand debuted.

But not everyone is happy with the addition of Newsstand to the iOS ecosystem. For some iOS users, the empty, glaring bookshelf of the Newsstand icon has been a source of irritation. Indeed, the addition of Newsstand is listed as one of very few complaints about iOS 5 across the web. Because Newsstand is a folder, rather than an app, you can’t easily remove it from your home screen, but some clever folks figured out a workaround that doesn’t require jail breaking.

These individuals, however, seem to largely be in the minority. Legions of users are filling up those bare shelves with digital subscriptions, giving a much-needed boost to magazine and newspaper app makers, and the publishing industry in general.