Yesterday, Apple announced that it will be launching an App Store for Mac OS X, modelled after the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It will be available 90 days from now and we believe it will be a game-changer for several reasons.

Why? Because it maps a very successful concept from the handheld world to the world of the personal computer (yes, the Mac is a PC…), and it translates very well.

Here is why it will be a success:

• Apple is the payment proxy, which makes payments easier and safer for users. Developers don’t have to handle payments, and users get a streamlined way to pay for apps. Yes, developers have to give Apple a cut, but that should easily be compensated by increased sales and sheer convenience. See the next point.
• Easier, safer payments = more app sales. People will buy more apps since there are less obstacles in the way (perceived or real). It’s just one click.
• Easier to find the apps you want. Instead of having to go through the entire Web, you can search in one place. This of course provided that the Mac App Store will be widely adopted, but we think it will.
• Added exposure for apps, especially quality apps which will climb to the top. Users will effectively be voting with their wallets (or downloads, in case of free apps).
• A central, standard mechanism for updating apps. This is more of a biggie than people maybe realize yet. It’s an elegant approach and should simplify the process of keeping every app on the Mac up to date.
• Automatic installs. Installing apps is very simple on the Mac, but the user still has to do something. Now even that extra step is removed. The value of convenience shouldn’t be underestimated, and it’s highly likely that this added simplicity will boost the number of apps that people choose to install, because it’s never a bother.
• In-app purchases. The iOS App Store has support for in-app purchases, so we assume that the same will apply to the Mac App Store. This opens up a whole new market for additional content and plugins for Mac OS X applications.

And it’s still your Mac. If you want to sidestep the Mac App Store, you’ll be able to do so regardless if you’re a developer or end user. But why would you want to?

The key word here is convenience. All in all, the Mac App Store will make life easier and safer for users, which is also a win for developers and will lead to more apps being sold and downloaded. In other words, it’s a win-win situation for everyone (including Apple, of course).

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

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By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

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