Earlier this morning, Apple unleashed Mac OS X 10.6.6 which brought along with it the Mac App Store. Now that we’re rockin’ away on the latest OS version and have played with the App Store for Macs, we have some feedback. Join us for the ride, alright?

First thing’s first — when you fire up the Mac App Store you’ll be prompted to accept the new terms and conditions, if you don’t, or somehow don’t get prompted, you’ll receive an “Unknown Error” which has been troubling some users. After entering your Apple ID and accepting the new terms, you’re off the running. The actual process of finding apps really works just like it does on every iOS device — the layout is incredibly similar to the iPad’s App Store and there are buttons for Featured, Top Charts, Categories, Purchases, and Updates.

To purchase an app, well, just click the purchase button with price next to app of your choice. You can explore app pages in detail like you can on iOS devices with large screenshots, descriptions, user reviews, ratings, and extra information. Installing an app is super straight forward as well, and we love how the app icon animates and flys down to the dock and shows the traditional iOS progress bar until it’s installed. App installation varies on size of course, but we found a few seconds was the average for most applications — very speedy.

So far, we’ve enjoyed using the Mac App Store… it’s all part of Apple’s master plan, of course. You know, dumping those optical drives and transitioning to a mostly internet-connected and above all easy to use computing experience. The great part about the Mac App Store is that it should also help non-technical Mac users feel more comfortable installing, browsing, and purchasing more software thus directly benefiting the development community. Most of the apps in the App Store are what you’d expect so far — yes, the lovely and addicting Angry Birds is the #1 Paid app — but we can’t wait until more and more of our favorites start getting added.

One of our reliable Apple connections (not Jason Burford) just let us know some pretty fantastic news. It’s been widely assumed that Apple will start to roll out their FaceTime real-time communication protocol to more and more of their mobile devices (and possibly their computers), but until now, we’ve been in the dark on how this will actually work. After all, there are no phone numbers to call on an iPod touch or iPad. Here is how we have been told FaceTime will work on non-iPhone devices:

It’s actually pretty simple… Your Apple ID will be registered with your device/s, and that will allow other Apple devices to start a FaceTime call using your email address. Apple will also reportedly make use of push notifications to deliver these incoming FaceTime connection requests as we have been informed there is a push notification detector tied into the FaceTime frameworks in the new iPhone OS 4.1 beta. We’re not sure how Apple will handle an iPod touch trying to connect to a FaceTime session on an iPhone as it seems Apple would still require you to use the iPhone’s phone number, at least that’s how it seems currently. In all reality though, we’re pretty confident Apple will make a straight forward and unified way of talking to every eventual FaceTime-enabled Apple device or computer, and it might be an Apple ID, or possibly something else down the road.

Wow. Just wow. Marko Karppinen, head of a Finnish software development firm specializing in Mac software, just found himself on the wrong end of a security breach. According to his blog post from this morning Karppinen was the victim of a complex, crafty and well-executed scheme clearly carried out by a team of unscrupulous professional hackers. The end result; Karppinen’s Apple ID account was compromised and access to personal data was established for an unknown period of time. So how did this guerrilla team pull it off? They sent the following, umm, complex malicious code to Apple via email:

am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com

No, seriously. That’s how easy it was for some grammar-stallion to have Apple change the email account associated with Karppinen’s account and issue a reset password to the new address. Luckily the culprit wasn’t quite smart enough (surprising, we know) to change Karppinen’s security question so he was able to regain control of his account rather quickly. Well, at least no one can say Apple customer service doesn’t act fast. They responded almost immediately to the thief’s email and accommodated him without hesitation. Kudos, Apple Support!

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