Through apps mostly available via the Mac App Store, you can decide which components of the software set matter most to you and build up your own custom suite over time to meet your creative needs.  Here are the best alternatives I’ve found that offer similar functionality to what is available in each of Adobe’s products.

Acrobat to SmileOnMyMac’s PDFPen ($59.99, Mac) Possibly one of the best apps on the Mac is PDFPen. Like Apple’s Preview application that comes with OS X, you can annotate and add signatures to your PDF documents. Looking beyond annotations, you can scan documents directly into PDFPen and use its OCR feature on the scanned in text to make the scanned document editable. Being able to edit a PDF document directly, not just annotate it, and saving changes to it as a PDF document is another important feature PDFPen has. Exporting the document to Microsoft Word is a recently added feature that is also very useful. There is a Pro version ($99.99, Mac) that adds the ability to create interactive PDF forms, which allows you to add text fields, check boxes and radio buttons, as well as add submit buttons to your forms.  It is also one of the few apps on this list that has an iOS companion app ($4.99 iPhone, $14.99 iPad) with which you can share your PDF files with your iPad and iPhone via iCloud.

Photoshop to Pixelmator ($14.99, Mac) By now it’s no secret that Pixelmator is one of the favorite apps on OS X for many. When you think of Photoshop, you think more than just applying filters to your images; you want to edit them. With its multilayered support, you can easily touch up and enhance your images with Pixelmator.  Many of the same tools that Photoshop users have become accustomed too are here too, like the smudge, sponge and brush tools.  Pixelmator also comes with some basic vector tools that may be all that you need from a full-featured vector editing tool like Illustrator.  For most of your day-to-day image editing needs, and at the current low price point of $15, it is hard to beat Pixelmator.

Illustrator to Indeeo’s iDraw ($24.99, Mac) If you have not worked with a true vector drawing tool then you have been missing out on being able to make some really crisp and sharp graphics. Indeeo’s iDraw comes with a decent library of shapes to choose from and supports PDF and SVG import/export.  This means that you can import professional shapes from sites like VectorStock and iStockphoto and tailor them to your needs.  For shapes that are not included in iDraw’s library, you will find the pen tool up to the task of drawing your own set of custom shapes.  The gradient editor is more than adequate and you can edit and modify your paths with ease.  About the only feature that is great to have in Illustrator is the ability to automatically trace a path around an existing graphic — an important feature if you happen to inherit a library of graphics that you need to modify and resize to a higher resolution.  iDraw also has an iOS companion app ($8.99 iPad) that can be a useful as well.

InDesign to Belight’s Swift Publisher ($19.99, Mac) When it comes to page layout editors, what you are looking for is one that comes with plenty of pre-defined templates to choose from; this one has 180 different templates.  It also has the ability to create additional templates.  With Swift Publisher, you can create professional-looking brochures, fliers and newsletters.  It has a large clip art library, many different shapes to work with and a decent layer editor that allows you to work with multiple layers within your documents.  It also has some convenient features like the ability to quickly center objects on the page with the touch of a button — something that makes Swift Publisher a better choice as a layout editor over alternatives in the App Store like Apple’s own Pages app.

Premiere to TechSmith’s Camtasia ($99.99, Mac) If you are looking for a quick and easy movie editor, then look no further than iMovie (free, Mac). If you want something a little more full-featured, then consider stepping up to Final Cut Pro X ($299.99 Mac). But if you are looking for a tool that will help you create screen captures then Camtasia is the best tool that will deliver everything you need to make a professional-looking video.  Some of the included features with Camtasia, like the tilt and restore animations, will bring a level of professionalism to your online screencasts.  Besides being a great screen-capturing tool, its included video editing tool is also easy to use.  Definitely consider this one if you are not splicing together a feature film.

Audition to Amadeus Lite ($24.99, Mac) Of course there is Garageband (free, Mac) and LogicPro ($199, Mac), but if you are looking for a something with a simpler user interface for dealing directly with an audio file, then Amadeus is what you need. Zooming in and out and scrolling through an audio file is straightforward.  It even comes with full support for Apple’s Audio Units,  plug-ins that can be used to process audio.  There is a Pro version ($59.99, Mac) that adds multi-track editing, batch processing and some audio repairing features that enable you to remove some of the background noise from your recordings. As a free alternative, you may also and to try out Audacity (free, Mac).

DreamWeaver to Realmac’s RapidWeaver ($79.99, Mac) With the dawn of technologies like WordPress, Drupal and online hosting providers like SquareSpace, the need to create a website from the ground up for many has almost become a forgotten art form.  RapidWeaver includes 45 different themes that you can use to help kickstart your website development without having to learn how to code HTML and CSS.  RapidWeaver has more of a traditional WYSIWYG document editor feel to it than a traditional HTML low-level development tool.  It really picks up where Apple’s now-abandoned iWeb application left off.  Another great alternative to consider when editing HTML and CSS files on the Mac is Tumilt’s HyperEdit ($9.99 Mac) if you are looking for an editor more appealing to developers.

Flash to Aquafadas’ MotionComposer ($149, Mac) While MotionComposer is not available on the Mac App Store, I was able to pick up a license as part of a bundle from MacUpdate and I’m glad I did. This tool brings the same animation effects that you’d get in Apple’s Keynote and helps you publish them on your website.  MotionComposer will create both Flash and HTML5 animations from the same project.  You get to decide which format you want to publish on your site.  It can also integrate your animations into your iBooks Author document.  If you are just looking to add a little animation to your website, then this is the tool to get.  An alternative to Flash in the Mac App Store that you may also want to consider is Tumult’s Hype ($59.99 Mac), it too can output your animations as HTML5.

Provided you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, shopping for individual apps may be a much more economical route to go.  There are times when you are participating as part of a creative team that you must support the input and output formats of the tools your teammates are using.  This is especially true when you must hand off your artwork to a publisher or printer that requires a specific file format. When this is the case, you must purchase the tools that your team supports.

None of these apps listed are complete replacements for such development shops, but these alternatives will get the job done in smaller or one-person creative teams.  And at these prices, each one of these great software titles are definitely worth the investment.

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The following will explain the methods I’ve used over the past few years for finding some great deals on Mac software past few years, through app bundles, price tracking, and clipping the right digital coupons.

Independent app bundles

Bundled software — when five, 10 or even more apps — are sold together for one low price is a great opportunity to try out a new piece of software that you may not have thought to buy in the first place.  There is typically one (or more) big ticket or well known item in each bundle along with several smaller and lesser known items. And sometimes you get something really good you didn’t even know you’d use: a few months after I bought that Toast bundle, I found an opportunity to use Live Interior 3D, one of the apps included.  I ended up using it to model a couple of rooms in my house before purchasing new furniture. So think of app bundles as a way to buy the one app you want, while getting fully licensed versions of several additional software titles you may like — you just don’t know it yet.

MacUpdate Promo (macupdate.com). More of a full-featured app store on its own, MacUpdate has been offering some very compelling software bundles in recent years. One such title that I am always keeping up to date is Parallels.  At least one each year I will find a $49 bundle with Parallels included, and get access to some other great titles that I would not otherwise have purchased. The great thing about MacUpdate is that it will also manage all of your license keys online, and alert you via email when any of the software you have purchased has been updated.  There is even a MacUpdate desktop app that you can install that will keep your purchased software titles in check and notify you instantly when updates are available.  It works very much like Apple’s Mac App Store on OS X, only MacUpdate has been doing this long before the App Store ever existed.

MacHeist Loot (macheist.com). When it first launched, you were not exactly sure if you were participating in an actual heist or not.  MacHeist has made purchasing software fun by introducing a secret agent gaming element which provides even deeper discounts and access to additional software titles referred to as “loot.”  With the first round of online hijinks, you had to hack your way into websites in order to unlock secret codes. This of course was all staged and now there are iOS games like The Heist that you can download and play instead.  These games will link to your MacHeist account to unlock the same discount codes.  At the end of a series of missions, you are exposed to a great bundle of software for a very low price.

The rest of the pack. It’s not that any one of these other bundle sites do not offer equally as good of deals as either MacUpdate or MacHeist, they just are not nearly as well known and offer more of a no-frills shopping experience.  MacLegion, BundleHunt, StackSocial and ProductiveMacs have each proven to be a valuable source of great software for a great value. Another such example is Micromat’s TechTool Pro.  I can usually pick this up for $49.99 along with some other great apps in teh bundle.

Mac App Store price trackers

Nothing is more frustrating than buying anything, including an app from the Mac App Store only to see the price drop the next day.  While none of these services can actually predict the exact day when a developer will decide to drop their prices, some will at least alert you when they do.  Once alerted, you can take advantage of the sale before its too late and you miss yet another great opportunity.

AppShopper (appshopper.com). While you may be familiar with this site for iOS apps, it also covers OS X apps in the Mac App Store as well. With AppShopper, you can look at the pricing history of each app you are interested in and see if the developer has ever offered a discount.  You can also set up an account and be alerted via email when one of the apps on your wish list provides an update or changes its price.

Two Dollar Tuesday (twodollartues.com). The name says it all.  While not exclusively limited to Tuesdays, this site will list current deals for apps that are on sale in the Mac App Store.  They have a Twitter feed that you can follow, or if you like you can subscribe to their mailing list and get weekly email updates on deals.

Appy Fridays (appyfridays.com). Very similar to Two Dollar Tuesday, Appy Fridays will track different software deals.  They also have a Twitter feed you can follow and an email distribution list you can join.

Shopping cart coupon codes

There are still third-party software developers that sell their software directly from their own online stores.  Some of the larger ones rarely, if ever, participate in software bundle opportunities.  That does not mean that they do not offer discounts from time to time on their software in the form of coupon codes.

RetailMeNot (retailmenot.com). Taking coupon and promo codes from both merchants and customers alike, RetailMeNot is one of the top coupon code sites online.  It is easy to find the company you are interested in, just search for the company name or the domain name that the shopping cart is hosted on.  One of my favorites is TheLittelAppFactory, seems like there is always an active coupon code for their great assortment of software.  These codes are legitimate and most time are actually listed on the site directly by the online merchant that sets them up in the first place.

Even more coupon code sites. It never hurts to look everywhere before you give in and pay full retail price. There are many other coupon sites out there, such as CurrentCodes,  CouponCabin and CouponChief to name a select few.

While there are other promotions, app trackers and social coupon code sites out there, I have used each of the sites referenced above at one time or another.  Some sites that I haven’t listed here may offer great deals, but they don’t have the big ticket software titles that I am looking for. Each of the sites listed here have proven to be a valuable source for both great software titles and even better deals.

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“Sandboxing, although said to be a good protection from the malware, brings too many troubles to the applications themselves. I have made 6 builds trying to make MPlayerX pass Apple’s review and I have explained why some privileges are so important for MPlayerX to achieve this and that features, But the answer is NO, NO, NO, NO, NO and NO.”

The sandboxed app store version of MPlayerX wouldn’t be able to automatically load subtitle files, according to its developer.

Some of the MplayerX features affected by Apple’s sandboxing rules include the ability to automatically load subtitles and automatically play the next episode of a TV show, he explained.

QU said that version 1.0.16, which was released a few days ago, won’t come to the app store anymore. He will still try to make version 1.0.15 via the Mac App Store, but said that it will be a “limited-function version.”

This isn’t the first app to disappear from the Mac App Store over Apple’s sandboxing rules. Apple originally wanted to introduce mandatory sandboxing last November, but then twice delayed the deadline. Sandboxing eventually became mandatory on June 1. The move resulted in Postbox and other apps leaving the App Store, and prompted Instapaper developer Marco Arment to ask:

“How many good apps will be pulled from the App Store before Apple cares?”

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• More developers are removing their apps from the Mac App Store due to the sandboxing rules Apple instituted in June. Developer Marco Arment argues this will hurt Apple’s iCloud plans, and will make the App Store increasingly “irrelevant.”
• In preparation for its mobile patent infringement trial versus Samsung next week, Apple has submitted evidence showing that it was warned against copying Apple’s iPad design — by its partner Google, AllThingsD reports.
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• Fortune wonders why Facebook integration in OS X Mountain Lion disappeared between the beta version that developers were using and the final version released to the public yesterday.

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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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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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Now with OS X Mountain Lion, which should arrive some time this summer, true feature parity for Notes, Reminders and Notifications comes to OS X. I’ve spent some time with the new features, and I’m eager to share my experiences with you.

Notes

Notes syncing from iOS back to OS X has always struck me as a tacked-on feature, with notes buried in Mail.app, making viewing and editing notes awkward and unpleasant. With Mountain Lion, notes get their rightful position in their own app. The Mountain Lion version is a near-duplicate of the iOS version, and I do not view that as a criticism, because Notes on iOS is very elegant in its simplicity.

What I found interesting is while Notes can be turned on and off via the iCloud System Preference, it apparently still uses IMAP for some of the backend transfer as I was asked to enter in my passwords for my Gmail accounts. Notes appear to sync quickly, within a minute or so of being edited.

I’m really excited about Notes being easier to use in OS X. I swap between Evernote and Notes for my note-taking needs, with Evernote getting my article-length notes clipped from the web or imported PDFs, and Notes getting my day-to-day notes, like what printer my Mom has, dial-in codes for meetings, meeting notes, etc.

Reminders

Reminders, formerly To-Dos, made a lot of sense living in iCal pre-iOS. However, the Calendar iOS app never had to-dos, and with the advent of the Reminders iOS app, it became very uncomfortable having them stored in iCal. I always found iCal’s handling of to-dos unwieldy, and being stuck in a small pane off to the side didn’t help. It’s been said that the areas of OS X and iOS that are the most polished are the ones Steve Jobs was very involved in — if so, I’m fairly confident the man never managed a task list in iCal.

Now with Mountain Lion, to-dos are moved to their own Reminders app, and life couldn’t be better. It’s a nearly identical copy of the iOS app in looks and function, with two big differences: on OS X you can choose if a list is on iCloud or your Mac, and I cannot see a way to set a location-based reminder. While OS X isn’t really location aware (even though it does have Find my Mac), it would be nice if I could set a reminder in OS X for something I need to do at work and have my iPhone remind me when I get there.

Overall, I’m happy with Reminders in Mountain Lion as it allows me to easily manage my to-dos. While I still expect to handle most of my project-level task management in OmniFocus, Reminders will be the app I use to remind me of life’s daily minutiae.

Notifications

The last of what I call the Big Three features to migrate from iOS to OS X is Notifications. Users of Growl will find Notifications very similar as notifications are displayed in the upper right-hand corner. As with iOS, you can choose if an app displays a banner, an alert that shows up in the middle of the screen, a badge icon, or all three.

Right now, obviously, only the apps built into Mountain Lion are supported. According to this piece by John Gruber, only apps acquired from the Mac App Store can send events to Notifications. As an aside, you can configure Mail.app to only alert you if you receive an e-mail from someone you have flagged as a VIP, which helps cut down on the popup clutter.

So far my experiences with Notifications have been light, with not many apps supporting it. I’m not sure if Notifications will ever fully replace Growl for me since not all the apps I rely on Growl for are available in the Mac App Store.

Final thoughts

Apple’s headline on the Mountain Lion web page is “Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac,” and that’s pretty much true based on my usage of it so far. I’m happy there is feature parity between iOS and OS X for Notes and Reminders. If you don’t complement your Macintosh with an iOS device, you may not derive the same excitement I do from these new features. But if you’re a  heavy user of Notes and Reminders you will be thrilled that these apps are now on OS X.

One hope I have, with OS X moving to a yearly upgrade cycle, as iOS has always had, is that features that complement each other on both operating systems will be released at the same time, and not with the lag we currently have.

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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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Apple on Thursday released a developer edition of Mountain Lion, the next upgrade of it’s operating system that will go on sale sometime in summer this year. As part of the news, the company shared some metrics about OS X Lion (version 10.7). For instance, the operating system that was released in July 2011 has so far shipped 19 million copies.

According to Apple, about 20 30 percent of Mac users are currently using Lion, while 50 percent of Mac owners are using Snow Leopard. The brisk sales of Mac machines over past two quarters — 10.1 million in the past two quarters — has helped the penetration of OSX Lion.

The company also touted its Mac App Store as a success and added that more than a 100 million apps have been downloaded from the store. OS X Lion was the biggest test for digital downloads and the company had pushed hard to make Lion downloadable from its app store. It sold a million copies of the software within a week of the release of the OS.

Apple has seen a nice bump in sales for its own software — iLife, iWork, FinalCut Pro and others — as a result of the growing popularity of the app store. Nearly 25 percent of the apps in the Mac App Store are games, indicating that Mac is becoming a major force in desktop gaming as well. With the upcoming version — Mountain Lion — which supports cross-platform gaming via GameCenter, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mac and its hardware brethren start to get more attention from the game development community.

For more information on Mountain Lion, read Erica Ogg’s news report on OS X Mountain Lion.

Updated: I had incorrectly mentioned that Lion OS-X share was 20 percent when in reality it is 30 percent as per Apple. The error is deeply regretted.

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The two big new features in the 10.0.3 update, which is free through the Mac App Store, are multicam editing, allowing users to automatically sync a maximum of 64 angles of video and photos, and a beta version of a broadcast monitoring feature that works with both Thunderbolt and PCIe cards. The removal of multi-camera editing was a major complaint among FCP 7 video editors, since it made combining photo and video from multiple camera sources a much more complicated process.

In addition to those new features, the update also brings improved image and color controls, including the introduction of color sampling, edge adjustment and light wrap editing abilities, which means you’ll be able to depend more on FCP X directly, and less on external programs like Motion when working with complex keying challenges, Apple said in its press release.

Apple also took the opportunity of the release to point out that the third-party application ecosystem for FCPX has grown considerably in recent months, and now includes tools like 7toX, which allows FCP7 projects to be imported to the newer software. The inability to import old projects in FCPX was another of the major complaints users had with the latest version.

Apple promised updates to answer a lot of user concerns with the software back when version 10.0.1 delivered XML support, and judging by a recent Ars Technica report on the continued reticence of video pros to use the software, the sooner it can deliver more updates like this one that address major pain points cited by users, the better.

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