Congratulations on your new computer and welcome to what's most appropriately called the Cult of Mac. Today it's a laptop. Tomorrow it'll be a sticker on your car window and by the end of the month you'll have a tattoo and refer to "His Steveness" when you talk about the leader of the gang. But it's all good.
After the tremendous success of the iTunes Store, Apple did recently launch a version of the store for Mac OS X applications called, you guessed it, the Mac App Store. To download and install it, check out my earlier article: How to Get Started with the Mac App Store.
Got it installed? Good, because it's pretty easy to work with, actually, and doubly so if you've spent time exploring iTunes.
To find a specific app, you just need to type in the App name or a word or two of the description into the search box.
Here's the top of the App Store window when you connect:
Click into the search box and type in "faceti" and you'll see it'll magically offer up possible matches as you're proceeding:
There's what you seek: "FaceTime". Click on it and ...
At this point you could actually click on the buy button (cunningly disguised as the price label) or you could double check it's the app you seek by clicking on its name, which takes you to an entire page about the app, including screenshots and user reviews:
At this point, let's go ahead and spring for the $0.99 for FaceTime. What a deal, really! To buy an app in the Mac App Store, you simply click on the price. Here it's "$0.99 Buy".
You'll need to log in with your iTunes Store credentials (since you already have a credit card on file with that store, I bet. That's how it processes payments):
Entered the correct data and pressed "Sign In"? Good. Now it'll make sure you really want to actually buy the application, and that you're not just exploring...
Click on "Buy" and you'll see an animated icon fly up from the page and plop into your Dock. If you're fast enough and have good eyes, you'll see that the application icon in the Dock actually has a progress bar that shows how far along the download you are:
Once it's finished downloading the progress bar will vanish and the App -- FaceTime in this case -- is ready to enjoy.
That's about as easy as it could possibly get, I'd say!
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Hi, HELP! I have followed these instructions as I too would like FaceTime (I had a demo version that just expired) and it does not appear on the menu in the App Store?! I type in facetime (and tried "facetime for mac" too) and it only comes up with things like shortcut apps to use WITH facetime on iPhones etc. I only have a macbook (2011) and really want facetime (more stable than skype in my experience). Is there something crazy like Facetime isn't available in all countries or something???