Ron Johnson did wonders at Apple, crafting a shopping experience like no other and that the competition would do well to ape (although not quite that closely, Samsung). But in his CEO role at J.C. Penney, things aren’t going well. His cunning plan of stopping race-to-the-bottom discounting, in favour of quality and honesty has made customers leave in droves.

Meanwhile, over at Apple, new retail VP John Browett has pissed off a whole bunch of people—not least staff—by attempting to make the already hugely profitable stores more profitable. His cunning plan: get rid of staff and essentially make Apple Stores more like any other mass-market retailer. To be fair to Browett, that’s what he knows—he used to fly high at Dixons and Tesco, neither of which is renowned for being a great experience, but Tesco at least is insanely profitable.

While it won’t happen, it strikes me everyone would be a lot happier (and two well-known retailing experiences wouldn’t be derailed) if these guys just swapped places.

Those cheeky chappies at Tap! magazine have been looking at the numbers surrounding iOS, and they’re big: 650,000 apps, 75 per cent of parents sharing app-enabled devices with kids, a grand a second raked in by Apple through the App Store, and, apparently, enough iPhones and iPads have been sold to make a Saturn-like ring around Earth. I also chuckled on reading Tap!’s extrapolation regarding the number of apps:

It would take you a week just to read the names of all the apps on the store

That’s how I feel time’s passing when trawling through insanely long RSS feeds, looking for apps to review.

Anyway, the spiffy graphic is below (Control/right-click and select the relevant option to view in big-o-vision) and Tap! the app is available now from the App Store. It’s very good.

Mac Performance Guide writes about data loss with OS X Mountain Lion and Save As. The Save As command was effectively removed from Lion, with Apple clearly wanting to end people’s reliance on saving at all, instead letting the OS deal with such things. In order to facilitate making copies of files (which many users had been trained to do via Save As), Apple provided a Duplicate option to clone an open document.

From what I can tell, Apple’s brave new way went down like a spoonful of piss. There was a lot of bitching and whining about Apple being stupid idiots for changing the way you deal with files. Personally, I liked the new workflow: I so often accidentally overwrite boilerplates, but the Duplicate option also enables you to revert the file you’re cloning from, which was for me a little slice of bliss.

Still, Apple relented and brought back Save As in ‘hidden’ form to OS X Mountain Lion (it’s only visible upon holding Option when you’re in the File menu). But instead of just saving a copy of the current document with a new name, it also overwrites the original with the same changes. Either this is a bug or Apple really has it in for anyone who doesn’t like its new ways of doing things.

The Mac App Store’s in people’s thoughts of late. Marco Arment recently wrote about how sandboxing (essentially, a much stricter set of entitlements every app—bar Apple’s own, naturally—has to abide by) has impacted on available apps. Some developers have had to reduce the functionality of their product or remove it entirely. Arment said he’s now

lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.

This, he argues, has the knock-on effect of causing problems beyond the world of geeks. Pretty much any user who suddenly finds an app no longer available on the Mac App Store might get annoyed at the developer, but they’re at least as likely to lose trust in Apple. Arment:

To most of these customers, the App Store is no longer a reliable place to buy software. This jeopardizes Apple’s presumed strategic goal of moving as much software-buying as possible to the App Store. By excluding so many important apps and burning the trust of so many customers, the App Store can never become ubiquitous.

Neven Mrgan adds that the Mac also isn’t iOS. With casual users increasingly opting for iPads over Macs, there’s the possibility Mac users will skew slightly away from the casual end of the spectrum, but they’ll be faced with a Mac App Store lacking advanced apps, apart from Apple’s own or those neutered to work within Apple’s sandboxing rules:

[Put] the two facts together—the loss of casual users to iOS, and the loss of non-casual apps on the App Store—and it starts to look like a problem.

In a follow-up post, Arment argues against the assertion that the issues currently being experienced will only affect geeks, and Lex Friedman for Macworld today also suggested customers should be wary of the Mac App Store.

My own thinking with the Mac App Store has been the biggest U-turn I’ve had since first owning my own Mac in the 1990s. I started off loving it. It was, I thought, the future, especially when setting up a new machine. No more hunting for DVDs and installer files! Just type in your Apple ID, download your software and—boom—sorted! And then a critical Coda update arrived for the direct version but only for the Mac App Store release a week later. And then the new version of Moom was direct-sales only. And then WriteRoom started to suffer annoying sandboxing issues regarding switching formats and saving a file. And. And. And.

My confidence has gone in what should have been Apple’s biggest and best feature from the Lion era. I had planned to rebuy apps on the Mac App Store and transition to it as fully as possible; now, I just don’t see the point. I’d sooner deal direct with developers, because then I won’t run the risk of an app I use daily being forced to cut itself back or be removed entirely at the whim of Apple. But this isn’t due to me being a geek, but through being repeatedly burned by a store I thought I could trust. That’s something anyone can and will empathise with, not just people who live, breathe and eat Apple.

Tap! magazine deputy editor Matthew Bolton has written about IAP in iOS gaming, complaining about its increased dominance and the way that many developers don’t know where to draw the line. He talks about two different approaches: ‘complete’ and ‘endless’. The former is where you have a finite amount of game, chop it into bits, with some of said bits being premium upgrades. Hero Academy is a good example on iOS—a game where you can happily play for free, but where you must pay to unlock alternative teams and cosmetic upgrades. The endless approach is the one I’ve complained about before, where you require an in-game resource that either demands constant payment or that possibly recharges in a glacial manner, sapping enjoyment and increasing frustration. Bolton cites the bafflingly highly regarded CSR Racing as an example of this kind of freemium title; depressingly, it also manages to kill the satire in my piece that I linked to, in actually demanding payment for petrol. In a racing game. I think the phrase rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.

Bolton says greed is the problem (and that’s certainly the case in games that would otherwise be pretty good, such as EA’s latest Tetris for iOS, ruined by the freemium system), and he wonders if freemium will cause iOS gaming to be held back in terms of creativity:

If it looks like invasive IAPs are the only way to be successful, will brilliant games that don’t fit that model end up going elsewhere? When games are being created with the Endless model in mind, do traditional game mechanics, such as progression, fall by the wayside? I played No Zombies Allowed for a while, but gave up after a few days, because all I was earning was more of what I already had. I was accumulating, but for what? The game didn’t escalate. I was just building and building. What if all devs interested in offering a game with an actual pay-off abandon iOS for Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft platforms? That would be a huge regression for iOS gamers.

Those of you with long memories will argue we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s, arcade games were designed with a fixed chunk of time in mind for your 10p or your quarter, but if you got good—really good—you could sit on an arcade cab for hours. Those were the finite games of their day, and they were about challenging gamers to beat them. After the gaming crash in 1984, and with the realisation that almost every arcade game was selling fewer cabs than its predecessor, cynical business models took over. Games no longer gave you three lives and a stern challenge: instead, they eventually got to the point where they were totally impossible to beat, but they’d give you that wonderful option of the continue. “Feed me more money,” they’d say, a glint in their eye, “and you can carry on from where you just left off. Your time won’t have been wasted! Go on! You know you want to.”

To my mind, far too many iOS freemium games are now the ‘continue’ of modern gaming. They are designed around keeping you hooked through the time investment you’ve put into them, rather than around addictive, exciting, engaging game design. The problem is, money talks, and with top-grossing titles typically being the most exploitative money-gouging games on the App Store, why wouldn’t more developers head in that direction? My hope is that something—anything—will make them change course, or at least leave enough of the really great developers playing a fairer game, because otherwise the greatest platform since the dawn of home gaming will end up bloated and dying on the floor, surrounded by mouldy piles of pointless Smurf berries and tarnished ‘coins’, which are only accepted currency for a stupid pixelated hat or a hateful paid-for fuel top-up for a virtual car.