2011: Year of the desktop app store?

Apple's Mac App Store is only the latest effort to make finding and installing software on your computer as easy as it is on your smartphone. Developer Sergio Tacconi spent several sleepless days and nights porting his app, Pocket Yoga, from the iOS mobile platform to Mac OS X. He wanted to have it available for sale in Apple's Mac App Store on Jan. 6, when the new online software store launched. The task was "harder than expected," he says, "but put in perspective, it's a small investment with a potentially big gain."
That's what many developers who already have iOS apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad are hoping for: big financial gains from selling their apps, rewritten to run on Mac notebooks and desktops, through the Mac App Store. Since the store's launch, for instance, developers at Evernote say they've seen a huge increase in the number of new users of their note-taking application. Because signing up for Evernote is free, that change doesn't directly affect the company's bottom line, but it stands to reason that some portion of those new users will sign up for Evernote's for-payment Premium service.
Of course, Apple isn't the first major player to apply the app store model, generally associated with applications for smartphones and tablets, to software for notebook and desktop computers. Intel, for instance, launched its AppUp store in early 2010. AppUp is a software front end that's mainly for Windows netbooks running on Intel's Atom processor, but it also works with desktops and laptops running Windows 7 or XP (but not Vista).