When I was at WWDC 2010 a couple weeks ago, I took a picture of this synchronized cinema display that shows the activity of the 50,000 most popular App Store apps. Each app falls when downloaded and is sorted based on the color of its icon. It takes 10,800 apps to fill the display completely. The most frequent apps that were downloaded were Facebook and Twitter... both blue.
How did Apple do it?
"This hyperwall is powered by 30 Mac Pro towers with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and EVGA NVIDIA GTX 285 graphics cards. As apps are downloaded from the App Store, their data is coalesced via an XML feed every five minutes. Apps are sorted and scheduled using Cocoa and Objective-C. The data is then passed to an OpenCL Kernel, which drives the animation. Quartz Composer brings all the technologies together and renders the final synchronized output using Quartz Composer Visualizer."
