14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Seth Willits informs that his QuickPick application is being kicked out of the Mac App Store, even though his app existed long before Apple's Launchpad, which does pretty much the same thing, but with far fewer options.
QuickPick is an application and document launcher that works much like Apple’s Launchpad in OS X Lion, but has been around for years.
“Apple has apparently decided to remove/retroactively-reject QuickPick as being too similar to 10.7’s Launchpad,” the developer writes.
Granted, it’s Apple’s launchpad that does the cloning, but any app that gets rejected from the App Store on similarity grounds is a clone, as far as Apple is concerned.
Now, it may be worth noting that Seth’s app is actually quite a great piece of software.
Softpedia has had a quick run with the app and determined that it’s actually much more useful than Apple’s simple Launchpad.
While Lion’s Launchpad simply acts as a launcher (admittedly, it's all that Apple wanted from the app), QuickPick does much more, and allows for some great customization.
First off, it can have a global hot key set, something that Lion’s Launchpad can’t.
You can move apps around with greater ease and flexibility, and their icons are allowed to stay scrambled on screen, as if you were arranging your Windows desktop icons.
Who is Apple to tell you which corner of the screen gets what app icon, right?
Furthermore, QuickPick has dedicated preferences, whereas Launchpad doesn’t.
QuickPick lets you set the applications’ icon size and text, the spacing between them on the horizontal and on the vertical, it lets you choose to have the background blurred or darkened when it launches, and so on.
Based solely on its usefulness, the app clearly deserved a place in the Mac App Store. But there are some graphical elements that may have had something to do with its rejection.
The + (plus) button, for instance, brings up a tray (for multiple application pages) that is nearly identical to the one used by Apple’s Dashboard application for widgets.
The fact that it runs on Snow Leopard can also be considered a factor for its failure to make it in Apple's venue.
Apple could be thinking “What if folks decide to put off their Lion purchase next summer simply because of apps that replicate its functionality on older versions of the OS?”
But in the end, it’s most likely the look and feel of QuickPick that saw it banned from Apple’s digital storefront for Macintosh applications.
Seth, this may be of little comfort to you, but know that you’ll always have a spot right here on Softpedia.