J complains that the Mac version of Kindle is not exactly stable:
The Kindle for Mac application is crap. Not in the sense of “limited functionality and poor UI†(although those are true, too), but in a more serious “corrupts user identity every time it does its (weekly?) auto-updateâ€. I had originally thought the problem was with the version available in the Mac App Store (which, thanks to Apple, is much, much older), but no, the direct download from Amazon does it as well.
I’m guessing that Amazon is starting to wean itself from Apple given that there’s the issue of in-app purchasing hanging over their heads. I’m not really sure if there wll even BE a Kindle version in the App Store in two months, esp if Apple sticks to the June 30th deadline for in-app compliance.
Even if Amazon and Apple divorce, iOS/OSX users will eventually be able to use the web-based version of Kindle though. I haven’t used it yet, it’s still in beta, but it should be available soon. At such point I would expect Amazon to dump a lot of dev resources into the web version as well to keep people from jumping ship to ibooks.
The Mac App Store is run as poorly as the iOS App Store, but doesn’t have the same restrictions on what kind of apps you can publish through it. Yet. There are a lot of folks who think the next major release of MacOS X will be “iPad-ified” in very unfriendly ways, beyond the ones they’ve already announced. Picking a fight with Amazon would be the same sort of bad judgement, and also sadly believable.
I think the problem at Amazon is simply that the non-mobile clients are not being developed by their best and brightest. The Windows version doesn’t seem to have this specific problem, but it’s still not a very good application.
-j
FWIW, the Kindle app on my Samsung GalaxyS (Android, rooted) works flawlessly. So far. I use the nook app more, as I usually buy from B&N. The one issue I do have with Amazon is that they’re going a bit wild with the “There’s an App for that!” concept. There isn’t “just” and Amazon app. There isn’t “just” an Amazon shopping app and the Kindle app. There’s also one for Music downloads, and a separate app just for Audible (which Amazon bought at some point, apparently) audiobook downloads. And for some bizarre reason I can’t buy audiobooks through any of the Amazon apps, only through the Audible app, which just sends you to the browser. Bad enough as it is, but I can usually purchase audiobooks cheaper through the Amazon site then downloading via Audible.
J, is there an API for the Kindle Store? Seems like low-hanging fruit for an app developer..
I don’t know if the Amazon APIs go all the way to completing a purchase; the one time I tried to use them for searching, I could never get the results I wanted (I was trying to find the minimal number of Marketplace dealers to buy a list of items from, to cut international shipping costs).
-j
@J Greely: “There are a lot of folks who think the next major release of MacOS X will be “iPad-ified†in very unfriendly ways…”
I hope not. I like it primarily because it’s Unix; I generally have a fistful of terminal sessions open to command lines. I’m to the point now where there are only a couple of minor things for which I still use my NetBSD box; I’ve been considering making a smaller NetBSD box to run those few things that I don’t want on my Mac.
If they start dumbing down the Mac, I’m going to be annoyed.
As for the Mac Kindle app, I’ve not had trouble with it. However, I really don’t use it that much; I downloaded it primarily so that I could read one specific book while doing something else a while ago and haven’t used it much since. I just fired it up and it seemed to sync up just fine without confusing anything.
One odd thing about Amazon.com, though, is that I seem to have two accounts that differ only by password. If I use the wrong password when logging in, I’m in an alternate universe that doesn’t know about my Kindle…