Katie Marsal
The array, mounted on a wall inside San Francisco's Moscone Center West, is made up of twenty edge-to-edge 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, each of which are powered by a Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. One eyewitness says the systems are pooled together in one large, monolithic black box.
Quartz Composer is employed to render the icons rapidly and to automate their behavior. All of the icons are sorted by color and, importantly, aren't there just for show. While not quite a by-the-second recreation of what's happening at the App Store — as the results are delayed by five minutes — the "live" mural has each iPhone app's icon pulse light outwards in a ripple whenever someone downloads that app.
While certain apps tend to pulse more often than others due to popularity, the effect produces an animated digital landscape that draws the attention of nearly everyone in its path.
Apple's intention with the grid is not just to show the popularity among developers of the App Store — which has swelled to over 50,000 apps in total — but to illustrate that many of the apps they publish are frequently downloaded. The company reminds WWDC attendees that 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute, guaranteeing that the influx of developers descending on San Francisco this week are very much in demand.
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86 Comments
Interestingly, at least based on the very brief video clips, there are roughly 100-150 apps (based on my very rough estimate of 5-7 per panel) that are being downloaded at a steady clip, while the other 18,000 odd apps are just acting as a static background.
I'm sure over a longer time period you would see more randomness, but it's a little ironic that this mighty wall of icons makes it clear at a glance that most of the action is centered around a relative handful of apps.
Must be fun, though, if you have something on the app store that's included on the wall, to stand around and wait for it pulse. Especially if it's one of the almost continuous plusers, which must be hypnotic indeed.
This is very, very cool and must have been fun to work on. I wonder how long the engineers actually had to build it once someone had thought on the idea?
Must be fun, though, if you have something on the app store that's included on the wall
Or completely disheartening when you get to the 20,000th icon on the 20th display and find that your app wasn't included.
Really cool.
Now could somebody think about porting those apps over to OS X? expanding on them perhaps?
Because OS X sure could use a infusion of third party developer talent of that magnitude. Some of us need larger screens too.
There is the SDK and it runs the iPhone apps in there.
Not much more but a mouse button click to compile it for OS X.
Apple?
wish i was there