The Mac App store is really a cool thing, especially in that it lets you run the software on every computer you’ve authorized with your Apple ID. However, I’m already syncing a number of important apps between my various Macs with Dropbox. Today I’m going to show you how easy it is to combine Dropbox and the Mac App Store.

This whole scheme relies on a part of OSX brought in from NeXT and rarely acknowledged by users of OSX: the ability to have more than one Applications folder. Just like there are multiple Library folders on every OSX box (/System/Library, /Library, and ~/Library), you can create an ~/Applications folder and any application in there will be treated like a first-class application in /Applications. System Services work, installation checks and upgrades work, the whole nine yards. The only thing that doesn’t work is that other user accounts of the same computer can’t and won’t see your installed applications. Which, when talking about Mac App Store apps, is just fine, as they need your account credentials to make it work anyway.

So, to set this up, fire up Terminal, and issue these commands:

`The Mac App store is really a cool thing, especially in that it lets you run the software on every computer you’ve authorized with your Apple ID. However, I’m already syncing a number of important apps between my various Macs with Dropbox. Today I’m going to show you how easy it is to combine Dropbox and the Mac App Store.

This whole scheme relies on a part of OSX brought in from NeXT and rarely acknowledged by users of OSX: the ability to have more than one Applications folder. Just like there are multiple Library folders on every OSX box (/System/Library, /Library, and ~/Library), you can create an ~/Applications folder and any application in there will be treated like a first-class application in /Applications. System Services work, installation checks and upgrades work, the whole nine yards. The only thing that doesn’t work is that other user accounts of the same computer can’t and won’t see your installed applications. Which, when talking about Mac App Store apps, is just fine, as they need your account credentials to make it work anyway.

So, to set this up, fire up Terminal, and issue these commands:

`

On the rest of your Macs that are sync’ed with Dropbox, the second one is the only necessary one. It creates the ~/Applications folder as a link to the Dropbox/Applications folder. Now, anything put into the Dropbox folder is sync’ed to the rest of your Macs. Updating Apps from the App Store is seamless – the copy in Dropbox is upgraded and changes are pushed all around the place seamlessly.