Apple's Mac App Store opening January 6

Apple today announced that the Mac App Store will open for business on Thursday, January 6. By bringing the revolutionary App Store experience to Mac OS X, the Mac App Store makes discovering, installing and updating Mac apps easier than ever.

The Mac App Store will be available in 90 countries at launch and will feature paid and free apps in categories like Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity and Utilities.

"The App Store revolutionised mobile apps," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun. We can't wait to get started on January 6."

New and noteworthy Mac Apps

Just like on the iPhone, Apple now promises Mac users the ability to be able to "browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what's hot, view staff favourites, search categories and read customer ratings and reviews."

The Mac apps you buy can run on all of your personal Macs and updates are delivered directly through the Mac App Store to keep all of your apps up to date. The Mac App Store will be made available to Mac OS X Snow Leopard users as a free download through Software Update.

Developers set their own app prices and - again, just like on iPhone - keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, with Apple snagging 30 per cent to cover hosting and distribution costs.

Devs that might want to know more can check out developer.apple.com/programs/mac for further info on how to make their fortunes from making new Mac Apps.

Christopher Phin, deputy editor of MacFormat says of the new Mac App Store that: "It has the potential to help Mac users find and more easily install awesome new apps for their Macs."

The MacFormat man adds: "I'm glad it won't be the sole source of Mac apps as we've already heard about some apps being rejected on what I think are quite spurious grounds."