Editor’s Choice is exactly what it sounds like, a pick of the best apps from the App Store team intended to highlight something they don’t want to get lost in the shuffle of the 600,000 apps for sale in the iOS App Store and the 10,000 in the Mac App Store. The debut choice for iOS apps is Facebook Camera, a high-profile new camera app for iPhone, and the game Extreme Skater. For Mac Apps, Cobook and Deus Ex Human Revolution were the picks.

The first Editor’s Choice picks in the Mac App Store

Making the App of the Week free for the first time — it was for Cut the Rope: Experiments — is, as many will note, something out of Amazon’s playbook. A free app each day is one way Amazon helps people discover new apps in its Android Appstore. Who knows if Apple will ever do it again. It could have been merely an experiment — but it does show Apple is keen to try new things to improve app discovery.

It’s slightly ironic to me that Facebook Camera was one of the first choices for this new feature, particularly because when I tried to search for it in the App Store on my iPhone yesterday after news of its availability hit, the store returned the wrong results. Instead of Facebook Camera, it kept giving me Camera Awesome, iVideo Camera and iUploader for Facebook. What does it say about App Store search if the hottest new item can’t even be found by people trying to search directly for it? There are more drastic measures that need to be taken than just surfacing a few cool apps.

It’s obviously not a secret to App Store shoppers — or app creators for that matter — that sifting through hundreds of thousands of apps is tough. That’s why Apple has continued to introduce categorization features meant to more easily surface quality apps across different genres. There’s already the carousel of picks up top, the “New and Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot” sections, in addition to the top paid and free app charts, in addition to curated lists like Games, Education, and a variety of starter kits.

But it’s also not a secret to Apple. It’s presumably what was behind its purchase of app discovery tool Chomp back in February, believed to be for $50 million.

Not that any of these challenges have prevented Apple and its developers from making money on them. Apple has seen more than 25 billion downloads from the iOS store alone since 2008. But making that process easier is always welcome.

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Apple has officially recognized its 25 billionth iOS app downloaded by a customer. That customer, Apple announced Monday, is one Chunli Fu, of Qingdao, China.

This is just too perfectly fitting, that a customer in a major city in China ends up symbolizing the reach, influence and internationalization of Apple’s mobile App Store over the four years since its opening — especially when you also consider how China is so vitally important to Apple’s future as a company, and the degree to which Apple is entangled in China’s industrial and economic fortunes.

Taking the symbolism a bit further, the app that put the store over the 25 billion download threshold was Where’s My Water?, a free puzzle-game app made by Disney. Games have been the most popular apps over the years since Apple started allowing iOS device owners to download apps built by third-party developers.

As per the rules of the contest, Fu gets a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

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The delay itself has been greeted with mostly positive reactions from developers, who are thankful for the additional time to adapt to this new approach even if they are still anxious about the long-term implications. Chris Foresman wrote a great summary of sandboxing, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software covered some of the issues that face developers of Mac software, and Manton Reece, developer of Clipstart, explained why he is dropping out of the Mac App Store to avoid sandboxing entirely. Most discussion of sandboxing has focused on the security implications of the new approach. However, I think that Apple may be playing a long game here that goes far beyond incremental improvements to the security of OS X.

Sandboxing: Security is not the end game

I don’t mean to imply that security is not an important consideration. It is. The problem is that sandboxing is only partially effective as a technique to improve security simply because outright malicious software won’t use it anyway. Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster wrote an excellent essay on the limitations of sandboxing as a security measure. Gatekeeper is likely to be s more effective security measure. So if sandboxing is not the last word on the future security of the Mac platform, what else might be going on?

What use could there be for a shift in programming conventions that requires apps to assume that all their files and settings are held in their own isolated container? That requires developers to carefully document when, where and why they need to reach out of their sandbox. That puts the OS in charge of allowing apps to access shared resources instead of unfettered access to the whole filesystem. What use is there in breaking long-held traditions of using arbitrary file access to enable shared settings? Why remove the ability to talk to other apps through Apple events?

It is not a far stretch to consider that this shift in approach might have a connection to Apple’s long-term plans to make iCloud the center of their strategy for the next decade. Apple intends for developers to move away from reliance on direct access to all of the nooks and crannies of the local filesystem on the computer and instead package up their files using the container approach. Self-contained sandboxes are more easily copied and moved between machines and are easier to back up. More and more, applications interact with online services across multiple devices. If your digital “stuff” is strewn about the cloud and across a couple of Macs (work, home, desktop, laptop) as well as multiple mobile devices like your iPhone and iPad, a dotfile on your computer might not be the best place to store settings anyway. Sandboxing could be a step towards abstracting away the local filesystem in favor of cloud-based storage.

The long game of sandboxing

While we don’t have answers now, there are a few areas to pay close attention to over the coming months as Mountain Lion moves closer to release and iOS is updated as expected later this year. (WWDC this summer will be interesting.)

The first feature to watch is entitlements, which are the list of permitted actions apps are allowed to perform from within the sandbox. Apple has expanded them a bit in Lion 10.7.3, but developers would like more. Daniel Jalkut thinks it is urgent that Apple address the current scope of entitlements. “The number one broken thing about sandboxing as it stands today, is the list of entitlements is simply too limited.” Further refinement of the available entitlements is likely, but it will be more interesting to watch where Apple expands the access granted to sandboxed apps. Will there be more direct access to places in the filesystem? More access to hardware features like serial ports? Or just more refinement to the iCloud APIs? Entitlements will be a clear indication of Apple loosening up on app restrictions or sticking to their guns.

The second area to watch is to see what Apple will do to explain sandboxing to users. If this is truly a security-focused measure, I would expect to see more prompts in OS X about what applications are asking to do (or which entitlements they have requested). If sandboxing isn’t meant to keep users better informed on what apps can and can’t do, then I would suspect that sandboxing is more about corralling developers to interact with the system in ways that can be abstracted or redirected to iCloud.

The big question in my mind, is what will be done with inter-process communication? URL schemes, as we have in iOS, are certainly much more limited than Apple events, even with call-backs. However, URL schemes also provide an abstraction where they could be made to work in different contexts, such as on a computer, on an iPhone or in a web app. Surely, something else is coming to meet the need for automation, workflow scripting and sharing between apps if the Apple events system is being phased out. This will be a key area to watch over the next few months to see where the wind blows out of Cupertino.

I can’t shake the feeling that sandboxing is part of a much bigger play by Apple and that it connects to their strategy for iCloud. While all we can do at the moment is speculate, I feel certain that developers that can suss out the larger meaning here and see a few steps ahead of the rest of us have a real opportunity. We saw companies that pulled ahead of the pack with the first generation of mobile, connected, and social apps for the App Store. There is a similar opportunity here with sandboxing and iCloud to try and skate to where Apple is looking to send the puck, to borrow a phrase from Wayne Gretzky, instead of simply complaining that the puck is not where it’s been.

Tea leaves thumbnail used courtesy of Flickr user xJason.Rogersx

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TechCrunch first noted on Sunday that Evi had been flagged by Apple’s reviewers as “confusingly similar” to Siri, with True Knowledge, the company behind the app, having received notice late Friday that their app would be pulled from the App Store. True Knowledge had submitted a minor update to Evi that had languished in App Store review purgatory with no explanation for some time until Apple finally contacted the company about the update on Friday.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, CEO of True Knowledge, told TechCrunch that “I don’t think it takes too much of a leap of the imagination to realize that ‘confusingly similar’ is code for ‘competitive with’.” He went onto imply that Apple was worried about reviews of Evi–a natural language search engine that is a bit more sophisticated than Siri on certain queries–making the $199 iPhone 4S less compelling than the $99 iPhone 4, on which Siri is no longer allowed to run.

But after popular sentiment turned against Apple over the weekend, True Knowledge received a call from Apple reversing that ruling in the wee hours of Monday morning in Barcelona, where they were preparing for Mobile World Congress, sources familiar with the saga told GigaOM. Evi remains in the App Store, as noted earlier by The Verge, and Apple now plans to work with True Knowledge on creating a version of Evi that satisfies Apple’s concerns.

Sources familiar with the back-and-forth said that at this point Apple told True Knowledge it just wants the company to change the user interface of the app, rather than its basic functionality. And Apple also confirmed to the company that voice-driven search and voice-driven personal assistant features (setting up appointments and the like, planned for a future release of Evi) are fair game for outside developers within the iOS developer rules.

It’s unclear whether Apple really does mean that only cosmetic changes are necessary, or whether it’s just setting True Knowledge up with another series of hoops. Evi is similar to Siri in that it takes voice commands and returns search results, but Evi is actually the result of a True Knowledge “pivot” (read: now what are we going to do?) from a Web search company to a mobile-focused company. True Knowledge has curated hundreds of millions of facts and serves those up in response to queries, using (like Siri) Nuance’s technology to translate speech into machine-understandable queries.

Once you enter the mobile world, you find yourself having to play by Apple’s rules. Perhaps the most famous example was the showdown between Apple and Google over Google Voice, which Apple believed was confusingly similar enough to the main iPhone dialer as to restrict it from the App Store. A federal investigation led to its eventual approval and an acknowledgement from Apple that it needed to be more permissive when it came to potentially competitive apps.

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The acquisition, first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by Apple, gives Apple a pretty robust tool to improve its App Store. Chomp lets users find apps by searching without knowing the name of a particular app. Users can search by what an app does and then find relevant results, which start appearing right as a user begins typing. Chomp looks at all the data associated with an app to bring up results and also gathers information from blogs, social networking sites and other app stores to find what’s trending. The company also launched “Chomp Search Ads” last fall, a sort of AdWords program allowing developers to bid on certain keywords in app searches.

Verizon actually rebuilt its VCast App Store in September using Chomp to power discovery, even though it only had a few thousand apps in its store. It showed that even a big company like Verizon saw value in applying more smarts to app discovery, something the Android Market has been criticized for not improving upon. Chomp will reportedly continue to power VCast App Store for now, but that arrangement will eventually end as it gets integrated into the App Store experience, TechCrunch said.

The price of the deal was not announced though Bloomberg said it was worth $50 million. This is Apple’s second acquisition this year following its purchase of Anobit, an Israeli company that makes digital signal processing tech to improve the performance of NAND flash. It’s unclear if Apple under Tim Cook is going to be more acquisitive but Apple historically has not been a big buyer of companies like Google, Oracle and others. But with about $100 billion in cash and investments, it makes sense to look at absorbing more companies, as long as it can find a team that fits with its culture.

The purchase of Chomp, which has raised about $2.5 million, comes as Apple is closing in on 25 billion app downloads. It continues to be well ahead of Android Market but Google’s app store has been working to close the distance in the number of apps and downloads. I think this shows that Apple knows that it needs to continue to provide the best app store experience, which has been pretty good but needs to get better.

Even though it’s the only place to buy iOS apps, there are other services like AppsFire, Zwapp, Quixey and others that are showing how to make app discovery even smarter. The App Store is a big advantage for Apple and one that helps it compete well with Android and keep consumers and developers dedicated to iOS. If it can improve upon how many apps users download and discover, it can mean more utility for consumers and a bigger payout to developers, who have already gotten $4 billion in payouts from the App Store.

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When Snow Leopard came out two years after Leopard, it provided a lot of UI refinements and some important under-the-hood upgrades for developers, like full 64-bit support, Blocks in Objective-C, Grand Central Dispatch, QuickTime X, OpenCL, native Exchange support and more. Mountain Lion is a similar upgrade — it looks to improve on Lion with a lot of UI refinements and some significant changes for developers. But instead of under-the-hood improvements, the most significant changes appear to be out in the cloud this time around.

Here’s the list of changes that Apple is rolling out, and how they will affect developers:

iCloud

iCloud can store both documents and key-value pairs. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the developer is responsible for collisions and conflict resolution between different devices updating the cloud. Documents have a dialog to let users select which version of a file they want to use. If you need to merge document changes, you’re on your own. Developers will need to think really carefully about how to manage conflicts when saving to iCloud if you are syncing data between multiple devices/computers. It’s not clear yet if apps signed by the Mac developer program certs can access data stored by apps signed by the iOS developer program certs. We will have to wait and see what Apple intends here.

While Snow Leopard added Exchange, and Lion added iOS-like features, I think Mountain Lion will be remembered as the “iCloudification” of the Mac.

Game Center

Something like 25 percent of titles in the Mac App Store are games, and the percentage is also quite high on iOS. I think there is a major opportunity here for developers to port games from iOS and keep high scores, achievements and friend lists in sync. iCloud support also means keeping saved games and game states in sync across devices. I’m not sure Game Center will ever be as popular with gamers as Steam and Xbox Live, but it could be great for casual gaming. I’d love to see someone come up with Xcode achievements so I could compare KLOCs with my friends.

Developer IDs, App Signing, Gatekeeper & Sandboxing

A lot has been written about sandboxing, which is coming to the Mac App Store and Lion, in advance of Mountain Lion’s release. I don’t think I’ll try to add anything to the discussion except to point out that Gatekeeper should help to educate users on what the differences are. It appears that you’ll be able to sign your apps — and gain the increased trust of users — without having to submit to the App Store and agree to sandboxing. Of course, to use the iCloud features and other goodies like notifications, you’ll probably want to go with the App Store anyway. Overall, I think this will end up being a good thing, despite the growing pains endured during the rollout.

Ken Case of The Omni Group is optimistic about the announcements:

This seems like a very big deal to me. Partly because Gatekeeper takes a more proactive stance against malware, preventing malware developers from producing new software which infects systems rather than always retroactively tracking down the bad software and preventing it from spreading further.

But even more important to me is that while designing this feature in a post-Mac App Store world, Apple went out of their way to build a mechanism which still supports developers who distribute software through channels other than the Mac App Store. It would have been much easier for them to simply say “to get malware protection, you must use the Mac App Store; otherwise any software you use is at your own risk” — but instead they’ve introduced a new mechanism for identifying trusted developers who distribute software outside the Mac App Store’s curated experience.

Color me relieved!

Sharing

Integrating single sign-on for Twitter in iOS led to a marked increase in people signing up for Twitter accounts. Just as Twitter integration didn’t kill the sales of dedicated Twitter clients on iOS, I would expect that the market on OS X won’t be affected much. Of course, Twitter isn’t the only way to share things. Flickr, Vimeo, etc. are there as well. What I’m really curious to see is if developers will be allowed to extend the sharing sheet by registering their own apps on the system. That could be awesome.

Apple is trying to make it easy to add sharing to an app, but the real issue here is figuring out if your app needs Twitter integration or not. I’m not sure I need to tweet my word count from within BBEdit, for example, but I do like the idea of tweeting what I’m reading right from within Safari, or what I’m looking at from within iTunes or the Mac App Store. I’m hopeful about this feature, as long as developers are judicious in putting it to good use.

Notifications

I think this is one area that developers should really work to adopt. I’m curious to find out more if Apple will allow online services to send notifications to apps as you can on iOS (where Facebook sends a notification to the Facebook app, and Strategery tells you when you’ve been defeated, etc.). Because of the infrastructure needed to handle those types of notices (especially at Internet scale), I would look into Push IO and similar services to leverage so you don’t have to build it all on your own.

What Else?

I’m sure there will be much more to come as Apple makes their plans more public closer to the summer launch, but I think there is a lot of good stuff here that developers can use to improve and build on their Mac apps. I think that iCloud integration will have the biggest long-term impact on OS X, but the refinements in app signing, sharing and notifications will be important features for developers as well.

What do you think will be the biggest change to the ways you make Mac software today?

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Sure, we’ve seen doctors, restaurant servers, clergy, commercial pilots and salesmen of all stripes incorporating Apple’s tablet into their daily workflow. But it turns out the iPad is a cool and useful way to store and use hundreds upon hundreds of conversions and formulas that mechanical engineers (or those studying to be one) need to use on a day-to-day basis too, when they’re designing brakes or fans or bridges or elevators.

The app’s overall design is very similar to something Apple might make, in that it uses literal interpretations of what you might use in the real world. Like Apple’s own Notes app or Calendar app, the app’s “scientific calculator” is actually made to look just like a yellow notepad you might use to jot down a quick formula or scribble a quick calculation.

You can pick from dozens of formula categories, from actuator and bearing on down to spring and vehicle drive. Clicking on each topic — which look like textured leather book spines — gives way to hundreds of pre-stored forumlas, with an explanation of what it does.

Once you’ve done a calculation, you can save it to your favorites, email it or print it out if you’re connected to a networked printer.

Mechanical Engineer ($5.99) was developed by Marc Schulman, co-founder of Multieducator, Inc., which builds education-oriented software. The company started out making software for history students that was distributed by CD-ROM back in the mid-90s. But since the iPhone arrived, they’ve (wisely) moved into making mobile apps for a wider variety of educational specialties, now counting 35 apps for both the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad in the App Store.

Mechanical Engineer has been available for a year and has tallied about 20,000 downloads to date, according to Schulman. But it just recently received an upgrade that included a new series of formulas for hydraulic engineering, an upgraded graphic interface and the ability to print from the app.

I admit I would never need to use this in any capacity and there is a relatively small group of you readers that will find a need for this app, but it illustrates well how the iPad as a platform is changing the way that we work — toward touchscreen, always-on mobile devices — and inversely, how Apple has managed to work its way into highly scientific niches, decades after the very first time the Mac was deemed ” a toy.”

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Nguyen goes into a lot of detail, and it’s a must-read for anyone thinking about commissioning an iOS (or really any mobile OS) application. Here’s one passage in particular that I know will resonate with a lot of freelance devs:

Converting an iPhone app to iPhone/iPad universal app: This is the worst ‘additional feature’ found in iPhone development contracts. Because an iPad app is not a frikin’ additional feature. The iPad app is always more complex than iPhone app, and most of the time requires entirely different interface and interaction mechanism. It’s like making an electric bicycle and then convert[ing] it to a fuel-powered motorcycle! They are very similar at what they do, but under the hood, the difference is immense. [Emphasis in the original]

A lot of companies may be interested in what an app can do for their business, but without a good sense of what kind of resources need to be invested in order to create the app in the first place, there is bound to be ample frustration on all sides. Nguyen’s no-nonsense primer is a good way to help avoid some of that frustration.

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Munster claims discussions with a “major TV component supplier” which had been contacted by Apple about its TV display parts lead him to believe Apple is still on track to introduce a dedicated television device in late 2012. However, there’s a caveat: Munster thinks if Apple can’t get a revolutionary new content model in place, then it won’t move on the market this year.

The analyst then goes on to suggest three possible scenarios that might constitute a unique Apple approach to the television market. Those potential solutions break down roughly as follows:

1. Changing the experience, not the service

In Munster’s first scenario, Apple would basically leave TV programming to existing operators and simply layer its own interface software on top, including menus, guides, DVRs and content discovery. Munster notes that Apple was expected by some to manage its own wireless network in the U.S. ahead of the iPhone launch, but instead partnered with AT&T and focused on UI and UX instead of content. Remember that apps came after the iPhone’s original introduction.

2. A hybrid content model

Apple could also partner with existing networks to offer live TV, and at the same time, deliver on-demand content from providers like Netflix, Hulu Plus or any other content partner willing to play via an App Store-style distribution channel, Munster suggests. It’s a “best of both worlds” type solution, and would probably still come complete with an overhauled UX, but might be trickier to negotiate than option number one, since it involves negotiating with two different types of content providers.

3. A la carte

Munster’s last option is a completely customizable, a la carte option that would see users subscribe to live TV packages from content providers. This would be the most revolutionary of the options in terms of the existing TV experience, but it would also involve a dazzling shift in the way providers make their content available, and the negotiations involved in doing so would be challenging, at best. In the end, there’s also no real guarantee that selective programming is what viewers are after, especially if existing, less flexible bundles from other sources cost less.

GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler wrote last year that Apple’s television effort was more about experience than about content, and described a likely outcome of Apple’s TV endeavors that pretty much mirrors Munster’s second scenario listed above.

Given the challenges involved in negotiating the third solution, I have to agree that a system that works with existing content sources, but also opens up the possibility of apps for different kinds of content makes the most sense as a solution that could still make big waves in the TV industry while also remaining realistically possible in the near-term. Which of Munster’s Apple TV predictions, if any, make the most sense to you?

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