Edible Apple

Seeing as how the Mac App Store isn’t even a month old yet, it’s far too early in the game to predict what type of affects it will have on Mac developers, both big and small. Still, just a few weeks in and we’re already starting to hear Mac App Store success stories sprouting up here and there.

Just last week,Pixelmator proudly announced that they had already grossed over $1 million in app store revenue in 20 days. Now comes word that Autodesk sold twice as many copies (2 million to be exact) of Sketchbook Pro via the Mac App store in 20 days than they had during 2010. Now that’s impressive.

Interestingly enough, The Loop reports that Autodesk engineers had to re-code parts of Sketchbook Pro so as to comply with the arguably stringent Mac App Store development guidelines.

Autodesk engineered the Mac App Store edition of Sketchbook Pro to comply with Apple’s developer requirements, which are, as a company representative admitted, somewhat out of the typical comfort zones for Autodesk: For example, Mac App Store apps aren’t supposed to use private APIs, can’t incorporate their own end user licensing agreements, and can’t employ separate copy protection. As a result, sharing code with the iOS version made the process easier, though SketchBook Pro is scaled up to take advantage of the increased processing power and memory footprint of the Mac.