app-wall
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AppWall screensaver brings the App Wall to your Mac
Even though I haven't actually seen it in person, I've been a big fan of Apple's App Wall at WWDC every year; they've hooked up a bunch of servers and Mac pros in order to create an animated set of App Store icons that shows real-time purchases in a very visual way. Now, I can have a little piece of the App Wall on my Mac at home; a Polish developer named iApp has created an AppWall screensaver that's now available for a free download. We got in touch with App's Peter Tuszynski who confirmed that, while it doesn't work exactly like the official App Wall (it won't show you real-time purchases), the screensaver really does pull icons from top free or top paid apps by way of an option choice, and then it displays those icons on an ever-changing screensaver display. It's very cool. I downloaded it on my MacBook, and while the saver does take a little while to load up (it has to pull in all of those icons every time it starts up), it's a reasonable facsimile of Apple's official display. And you don't even have to buy tickets to San Francisco to see it! The screensaver is available for free right now. If the site's being hammered, just give it some time to recover from the traffic. There are also icons on the site that hint that Apple will bring this to the iPhone and iPad "soon," so we'll stay tuned and see what they've got planned.
New version of the app wall at WWDC
I'm actually driving up to San Francisco this afternoon for WWDC (and if you're there already, be sure to make an appointment to see us sometime this week!), but one of the things that I hope to get a chance to check out is the famous "app wall," a real-time view of apps being downloaded from the App Store. This year they've tweaked the setup a little bit, as you can see in the video from Mashable above. Last year, the app icons just rippled, but this year, they drop down and organize themselves into colors, creating an awesome effect of seeing what apps are going out through the App Store. And the hardware behind the setup is even more amazing than it looks: apparently they've got 30 Mac Pros running this thing -- data is fed from the App Store into an XML feed, which gets passed off to an OpenCL kernel, while Quartz Composer renders the final output. That's a serious setup for something just shown at one conference a year! But it sure is cool.
