All about the new, improved App Store in iTunes 9.0.2
Our eagle-eyed blogger David Winograd sent out a breaking news post Friday night to let all of you know that there were changes afoot in the iTunes App Store. Sure enough, those changes appear to have migrated through most, if not all, apps by now.
In my opinion, the new design makes more sense in the overall iTunes 9.0.2 layout than the "old" design did. The app icon is now very large (blue highlight in above screenshot), so apps with poorly designed icons will need to be retooled by developers in order to create something that grabs potential purchasers with one glance.
The app screenshots in the old version of iTunes were apparently confusing to a surprising number of users. The new design now shows two or three full screenshots of each app in action (see yellow highlight above), with a visible scroll bar at the bottom of the screenshots indicating whether the user can scroll to the side to see more. The old version simply showed one screenshot and required clicking on the picture to move to the next screen image.
For developers, there is now a very good reason to write a "killer description." The App description now shows only the first two lines (see red highlight above), and although there's a "More..." button that will display the full description, many users may not choose to click that button. Developers who have a herd of apps in their stables can now show a list of those apps on the left side of the App Store display.
I like the fact that the links for the developer and support websites are at the top of the page now; bloggers need to find those links for use in reviews, and they're no longer hard to find (in the red highlighted area). Attached to the Buy App button is a small pop-up menu (yellow highlight) that enables potential buyers to put an app on their wish list, send a link to a friend, or copy the link to the page. In addition, you can now send info about an app to Facebook and Twitter.
Many iPhone devs seemed to be happy with the changes on Friday night, although a lot of them seemed unprepared for the changes and were scrambling to update their descriptions as quickly as possible. For the average iPhone user, however, the new layout of the App Store in iTunes should be a welcome change.
