(Image courtesy of 9to5Mac)

After a lengthy outage on Thursday, the iPhone Developer website sparked back to life with a few interesting nuggets, including a new lower price for the Mac Developer program which has at least one tech blogger predicting a new App Store may be coming.

9to5Mac was busy on Thursday following reports that the iPhone Developer website was down for most of the day -- about six hours to be exact. When it returned, developers were greeted with a new agreement as well as a required survey. But that wasn’t all.

Developers who also code for the Macintosh were quick to note that the Mac Developer Program had a number of changes, the biggest of which was a new, flat $99 per year developer license to replace the expensive (and tiered) programs previously available.

On the downside, it appears that Apple’s hardware discount for developers in the costlier programs are now gone. But otherwise, the latest move by Apple appears to be aimed at enterprising developers looking to expand their success on the iPhone OS into doing the same on Mac OS X. At $99 per year, just about anyone can now create awesome new Mac programs.

But 9to5Mac’s Seth Weintraub doesn’t stop there -- he proposes an admittedly wild theory that Apple’s latest move might foretell the creation of a new App Store aimed at Macintosh software. The thrust of his argument is that by wooing “thousands more developers” from the iPhone OS over to Mac OS X, “These people don’t have a way to distribute apps or a marketing budget or finance department.”

Of course, there are some obstacles in Weintraub’s theory -- would such Mac App Store apps have DRM like the iPhone? Would they be distributed via iTunes? (Doesn’t make much sense since they’re not tied to a portable device, but who knows.)

“A Mac App Store makes sense for Apple,” Weintraub concludes. Only time will tell, but in the meantime, it will be interesting to see how all of the new developers make use of their new, lower cost of entry.