After a long and ambiguous wait, the Mac App Store has landed. After the addition of the iPhone App Store, a one-stop location for anything you could ever need on your iPhone or iPod Touch, the next logical step was to port that system to the Mac OS. It’s actually a bit surprising it took this long for it to be released. Now that it’s here, though, we’re on the precipice of a great surge in efficiency and productivity.

The Mac App Store is extremely similar to the iPhone App Store. The layout is almost exactly the same: they have the “Featured” section, “Top Charts”, “Categories”, “Purchases”, and “Updates” up top for navigation. The first page you’ll find yourself on is the Featured page, which contains a nice, clean content scroller up at the top, surprisingly enough, displaying featured apps. Below that is the New and Noteworthy section, presenting apps that have high ratings, top apps, and more; below that is the What’s Hot section, which displays the most popular apps, and below that there’s a Staff Picks section, which is useful because if Apple developers are using it, then you know it’s probably a worthy app.

The Top Charts section displays the top 12 apps for each chart – Top Paid, Top Free, and Top Grossing apps. Along the side is a Top Charts Categories sidebar, where one may peruse the top apps in each category with ease. Or, you could click the Categories section at the top for a bigger and more graphical selection, with the top three apps listed for each. The Purchases page is quite self-explanatory, and is useful in case you delete an app that you want to get back for one reason or another, as it will allow you to re-download apps that you have previously paid for. The Updates page is equally self-explanatory, but it’s nice to have one specific place to go to update all your apps at once, rather than just doing them individually when you happen to open an app and it informs you that you are four builds behind.

The Mac App Store is full of eye candy. In fact, one of the best parts about downloading a new Mac app is appreciating the often phenomenal icons created to represent them. Some of them are seriously art. The tidy structure and format of the app store make it a breeze to use, but even better to look at. It’s row after row of beautiful app icons, so it’s fun to use if only just to admire them. Each app has its own dedicated page. It contains a description that may range from one single line to multiple paragraphs, as well as screenshots, specs, customer ratings, and customer reviews. Everything you need to know about any app in a consistent display format, for every app on OS X, all consolidated into one easy-to-use marketplace. You gotta admit, that’s pretty convenient.

One complaint I have is one that applies to many other apps, mostly first party. It’s that the maximize button doesn’t fit the app to the screen. I understand their philosophy behind it, that it’s conforming it to the most efficient size and space for the specific app, but how hard would it be to make hitting the maximize button again full screen the app? The “maximized” version of this app leaves off a vertical strip down the side, as if I had just switched to a side dock. This drives me crazy. Luckily, there is a manual resize option accessed in the bottom right corner.

So no longer will you have to scour the web for obscure mac apps that do something incredibly specific. Just head over to the Mac App Store and find it. The creation of the Mac App Store does have a downsize, however, and it is that you can probably expect to see quite a bit of shovelware and Lite apps popping up in there. So there’s a good chance the market will become flooded very quickly. However, you will also see a rise in Mac apps in general since now developers have one consolidated location to submit them, consumers have one consolidated place to search for them, and people are probably going to be more willing to spend money on your app if it goes through Apple first. There’s more motivation than ever for developers to create, which makes the opening of the Mac App Store a very exciting time for Mac users, indeed.

If you’d like to download the Mac App Store, don’t go looking on Apple.com for it. You’ll find it in Software Update, residing in the OS X 10.6.6 update. Alternatively, here’s a convenient link: Download Mac OS X 10.6.6 + Mac App Store