Outsmarted
The Mac App Store is a welcome addition to my computing experience; for one thing, it allows me to purchase the two iLife apps I care about (iPhoto and iMovie) at half the cost of the full suite. Yesterday, I finally had time to take advantage of that—I bought both apps, at $14.99 apiece.
iMovie was perfectly straightforward. Locate it in the App Store, click Buy, enter some credentials, boom. iPhoto, on the other hand…
The App Store claimed it had already been installed, but I knew that I was two versions behind. Google revealed that one fix might be to rename iPhoto.app to something else. Well, you can’t do that in the Applications folder—at least, I couldn’t. So, I made a new folder called Old Apps in my home folder, moved (well, copied) iPhoto, renamed it to iPhoto Old, and deleted it from the Applications folder. I removed the icon from my dock as well, for good measure.
That did the trick; the App Store reported the new iPhoto as available for me to purchase, so I did. Except for one problem: I couldn’t find it. At first I searched help and Googled for how to invoke the new LaunchPad feature, which was supposed to hold all your App Store apps in one, easy to access place. Then I remembered that was going to be a Mac OS X Lion feature—we aren’t quite there yet.
Huh. All the help told me that App Store apps are installed to the Applications folder, as you would expect. But it wasn’t there, or anywhere. A Spotlight search only turned up my iPhoto Old.app. Then I figured it out.
Despite moving and renaming the app, the OS kept track of it, and knew that iPhoto Old was still really iPhoto. So, it had obligingly upgraded that app to iPhoto 11. Mac OS X is so smart, and so well designed to prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot by “organizing,” moving things around, and renaming them, that it all still just works. If I hadn’t removed iPhoto from the dock, I could have just launched it from there and got my new app.
I did put things back the way they should be—I like my apps to live in the Applications folder. You could say that Apple outsmarted itself, by having a bug that disallowed an upgrade while it was in the Applications folder, but it definitely outsmarted me.
Tags: iPhoto, Mac App Store, Mac OS X