Need to know when you bought an app from the Mac App Store? Knowing purchase dates of apps can be helpful for accounting and year end tax purposes, plus a variety of other reasons, and here are two quick ways to get that information.

Get a List of All Apps and Purchase Dates from the Mac App Store

Launch the Mac App Store and click on “Purchases” tab, you’ll find that apps are automatically sorted by purchase date, showing the most recently bought apps at the top. Shown is the original date the app was bought through the App Store, even if the the download progress was stopped.

If an app is missing from that list and you are certain you bought it with the same Apple ID, check the hidden purchases list.

Get the Purchase Date of a Single App from the Mac OS X Finder

Go to the /Applications folder, select an app bought from the Mac App Store, then hit the spacebar to enter into Quick Look. You’ll see the purchase date shown near the bottom:

Sometimes the Quick Look version will show the downloaded date rather than the purchase date, despite labeling it as purchase date. This typically happens when an app has been transferred between multiple Macs, and the Quick Look method is being used on the Mac that downloaded the app at the latest date. If you find this inaccurate, just use the Mac App Store method above.

Hat tip to FinerThings for the Quick Look trick.

The next time you’re trying to tell someone how to update apps from the Mac App Store, why bother with a walkthrough when you can just send them a URL? Yup, you can send someone directly to the Mac App Store’s “Updates” portion just by using a link:

Try it out, click here to launch the Mac App Store’s Updates or use the URL below:

macappstore://showUpdatesPage

You can use that link in web pages, tweets, instant messages, and emails, as long as the recipient has the Mac App Store installed the URL will immediately launch the App Store and go directly to the Updates section (no, it won’t actually update anything without user input).

Not only is this helpful when fielding those family tech support phone calls and emails, but it’s really useful for developers too, and in fact it has a pretty cool story behind it. It turns out, that aforementioned MAS Updates URL is a result of Panic Software wishing to be able to provide their users with an ability to quickly update apps with a click:

This is where I tell you something amazing: I filed a bug with Apple and made this specific feature request, even proposing the URL format, and Apple added it to the App Store a couple versions later. The system worked!

How neat is that?

Apple has posted their annual iTunes and App Store rewind lists for 2011, naming the best music, movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, iOS apps, and Mac apps for the year. We’ll cover the best apps for iPad, iPhone, and Mac, and you can check out the rest of the winners on the iTunes or Mac App Stores:

iTunes & iOS Apps of the Year 2011

• iPhone App of the Year – Instagram
• iPhone Game of the Year – Tiny Tower
• iPad App of the Year – Snapseed
• iPad Game of the Year – Dead Space

The App Store 2011 Rewind for iTunes can be found here and also includes the top music, movies, TV shows, books, and podcasts for 2011, in addition to showing the runners up.

Mac Apps of the Year 2011

• Mac App of the Year – Pixelmator
• Mac Game of the Year – Civilization V

The runners-up for the Mac App Store are djay and Anomaly Warzone, and the full list for the Mac can be seen here.

With the addition of the Mac App Store, transferring applications from one Mac to another is made extraordinarily simple and can be done entirely through the App Store itself. This is due to the Mac App Stores licensing agreement, which allows you to download and install Mac OS X apps on all of your personal machines, although they must all share the same Apple ID. Additionally, you can transfer apps manually over a network or with an external USB drive, but that method does not work with all apps and is therefore not entirely recommended. We’ll cover both and you can decide which is best for you:

Transferring Apps to Another Mac via Mac App Store

This is the recommended and most reliable method of transferring apps:

• Open the Mac App Store
• Click on the “Purchases” tab to list all of your installed Mac apps
• Find the app(s) you want to install on the other Mac, and click the “INSTALL” button on the right

Any apps that are not installed on the current Mac will display the “INSTALL” button rather than the lighter ‘INSTALLED’ or ‘UPDATE’. Unlike iOS, this has to be done manually even if you have set up iCloud, which does not automatically download Mac apps (yet at least). You can do the same thing with the OS X Lion installer if you’re looking to upgrade multiple Macs.

The downside to the Mac App Store method is that it re-downloads the app, and for users working with constricted bandwidth that may not be the best solution. For those situations, you can attempt the manual transfer via network or USB, but the reliability of this next method will vary depending on the app itself.

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New to Mac OS X 10.7.2 and iOS 5 is the ability to hide purchases from appearing in the Mac App Store, iOS App Store, and the iTunes Store purchased items lists. This is great if you download tons of stuff but use only a fraction of apps, and you don’t want the other items clogging up your purchase history. It’s also really easy to unhide purchases from all the online stores, and we’ll cover that too.

Hide Purchases from the iOS, Mac, & iTunes Stores

Hide a Purchase in iOS:

• Swipe over any app to reveal the “Hide” button

Hide a Purchase in iTunes App Store or Mac App Store

• Click on the “Purchases” tab, hover over any purchased item and click on the (X)

Of course hiding the purchases is only useful if you can see them again if you need to. That’s just as easy, and regardless of iOS or Mac OS X it’s done through the account settings of iCloud:
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Want to check the download speed of something you’re getting from iTunes or the App Store? No sweat, from the sidebar click on Store > Downloads. Here you’ll see the whatever items are currently downloading, and all you need to do is click on the progress bar to show the transfer rate.

This works for the Mac App Store as well.

The Mac App Store has a hidden element inspector that lets you view the source of any page or element drawn within the App Store, letting you extract text or images, and even enter your own code into the console (which can lead to all sorts of fun things). This is probably most useful for web and app developers, but anyone with some curiosity might get a kick out of this feature too.

To enable the Mac App Store’s element inspector, quit out of the App Store and then launch the Terminal. Enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.appstore WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

Hit Return and then relaunch the App Store. You can now right-click to “Inspect Element” on anything, just like you would in Safari through the developer DOM inspector tool.

As you may have guessed, this works because the Mac App Store is basically just a WebKit wrapper for a website.

There isn’t much reason to disable this feature because it’s only activated by a right-click, but if you want to, that defaults write command is:

defaults write com.apple.appstore WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool false

A common complaint about free app giveaways is that they’re often constrained to the USA based iOS App Store, in other words if you’re outside of the US you don’t get in on deals like the recent Rage HD giveaway and the ongoing myriad of other free app offers. This is a bummer for anyone outside of the USA, but thankfully, it’s somewhat easy to alleviate.

How to Access and Download US-based iOS App Store Offers from Outside the USA

The core solution here is to just create an alternate iTunes account that is based in the USA. If you’re going to follow this solution and juggle multiple iTunes accounts, this menubar utility makes switching between them easy and is highly recommended.

Before you get started, you’ll need two things:

• Register another free email account, Gmail is free, quick, and easy
• Any valid US address – use your cousins, uncles, Apple’s, Google’s, etc

Got that? Let’s get started.

• Open the App Store from an iPhone or iPad, and from the “Featured” section scroll down to the bottom and select “Sign Out”
• Now while signed out, locate a free app to download in the App Store, anything in the ‘free download’ section should work
• Try and download the free app, and then select “Create Apple ID” when asked
• Follow the instructions to create a secondary iTunes account, be sure to select United States as the country
• At the credit card and payments screen, select “None” and continue – if you have any problem with this step read our guide on how to create an iTunes account without a credit card
• After you have registered the US iTunes account, verify and activate the account by checking your freshly created email account from the first step

Now you should have complete access to the US iTunes and App Store, which lets you download any of the free apps only available to US-based users. Yes, this technique should also work for the Mac App Store.

Additionally, if you want to access paid US App Store downloads, you can always buy a iTunes gift card and redeem the code on the credit-card free iTunes account to have a balance that is then able to purchase apps as usual.

This great tip comes from iDownloadBlog.

It’s unclear why, but the Mac App Store is running a lot slower in OS X Lion for some users, including myself. By slow I mean you’ll encounter nearly constant beachballs as you click from app to app, with the absolute worst offender being the main category sections.

I’m assuming there is an underlying bug or issue with the App Store backend, so a true fix will probably come from Apple to resolve this, but in the meantime I’ve found a couple troubleshooting tips that help to varying extents: deleting caches, and changing a security setting.

Delete Mac App Store Caches

I’ve had some success with deleting the caches, but over time things slow down again. Try this first because it’s the safest method.

• Quit the Mac App Store
• From the Mac desktop, hit Command+Shift+G and enter:

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.appstore/

• Delete everything in this folder
• Relaunch the Mac App Store

Turn Off Certificate Revocation List in Keychain Access

Warning: this is more of a workaround than a fix, and it creates a potential security risk by disabling the systems revocation list, use at your own risk and read all steps before proceeding:

• Quit the Mac App Store
• Launch Keychain Access (use Spotlight or look in Applications > Utilities)
• From the Keychain Access menu, select “Preferences” and then click on the “Certificates” tab
• Change “Certificate Revocation List (CRL)” to “Off”
• Quit Keychain Access
• Relaunch the Mac App Store

Things should be a lot faster now, but because of the security risk it’s recommended to then go back and change the setting after you have relaunched the Mac App Store. There are mixed reports on if the fix actually sticks around with this method, but for security reasons it is highly recommended:

• Keep the Mac App Store is still open
• Open Keychain Access again, get back to the “Certificates” tab
• Set “Certificate Revocation List (CRL)” back to “Best Attempt”
• Quit Keychain Access

This second tip comes from MacStories, which I came across when reading @Viticci’s review of the new Core i5 MacBook Air. He also complained of the slowness of the App Store within Lion, and he’s not in the USA which shows this isn’t just a local server issue either.
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While clarifying the instructions on how to re-download Mac OS X Lion from the App Store I discovered a neat little trick; you can cancel downloads.

Hold down the Option key from the “Purchases” menu in the Mac App Store, this causes the “Pause” button to turn into “Cancel”

If you click that “Cancel” button you will get a warning dialog box asking to confirm that is what you wanted to do, and reminding you that can re-download the app again for free at any time.

The ability to re-download purchases from the Mac App Store is part of the personal use license for OS X Lion and other apps offered through the App Store as well, as long as you are downloading them on your personally authorized Macs using the same Apple ID.