Appcuity is the New, Better Appalicious

In “Appalicious Makes the Mac App Store Useful,” 1 September 2011, I described ProVUE’s clever application Appalicious, which presents information from the Mac App Store far more helpfully, neatly, and completely than Apple’s own App Store application. Now, in response to threatened legal action, Appalicious has changed its name to Appcuity, and its Web site has been renamed (and helpfully reorganized). In addition, ProVUE has taken this opportunity to implement some feature improvements.

The Appcuity database now tracks Apple’s Top Charts rankings, based on download counts for free apps and gross sales for paid apps. App ranks are displayed as a column of numbers in the Appcuity main window, along with historical information such as the highest rank a given app has ever achieved, plus a more extended history in the app’s detail window, so you can see how an app changes rank over time.

Equally intriguing are changes to Appcuity’s pricing model. (Disclaimer: Some of these changes may have been implemented in response to my suggestions.)

• Previously, if you didn’t purchase a subscription or extend your subscription through recommendations to a friend, Appalicious eventually stopped updating its data from the online master database. Now, Appcuity keeps working even without a subscription, updating itself from the master database once a week. At this level (called Appcuity Lite), some customization features and certain column and history displays are disabled. Thus, there is no serious reason why you shouldn’t try Appcuity and keep using it for as long as you like, for free; even at this Lite level, Appcuity will still be more informative than Apple’s App Store application.

• In addition to one-year and two-year subscriptions, the paid version of Appcuity (now termed Appcuity Pro) is now available through a one-time permanent license payment of $21.99, in effect bypassing the subscription model altogether.

ProVUE requests that existing Appalicious users download Appcuity promptly, as the online database will soon cease accepting data update requests from copies of Appalicious. The switch to Appcuity is completely transparent; your Appalicious subscription is turned into an Appcuity subscription automatically, behind the scenes. I downloaded Appcuity and launched it, whereupon it immediately displayed my existing Appalicious data and then updated that data based on my existing subscription, just as if Appcuity and Appalicious were the same application; since this was the same machine, I didn’t even need to re-enter my license information.

Appcuity is a 27.6 MB download. It requires a Mac that can access the Mac App Store (meaning Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later). New users automatically experience Appcuity as Appcuity Pro for a week; after that, it becomes Appcuity Lite unless you buy a Pro subscription or get a friend to try Appcuity.