MacUpdate Blog

Bundle #2 launch event Sunday 10:30pm, Dec 2

2007-12-01T13:53:00.000-05:00

MacUpdate Promo is launching our Bundle #2 this Monday on December 3, 2007. Join us Sunday, December 2nd, at 10:30pm (eastern time) in a web-based chat party where we will unveil the applications in the bundle and give free bundles away to party winners.

Much like last July, we will be playing a game where we will reveal an icon of one of the applications in the bundle. The first person in the chat room to correctly name the matching title of the icon will win a free bundle. The chat party will be limited to a maximum of 60 attendees so be sure to get your position in the chat room well ahead of time. Join the chat now and leave a message if you want!

Fix internal MacBook camera if it stops working

2007-11-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

I purchased a new MacBook recently. A few days after its purchase, the internal camera stopped working. Launching iChat or PhotoBooth activated the camera displaying the green light. The Apple System Profiler also showed that the camera was installed under the USB section. Everything looked good, except that the picture was black.

I read through the forums everywhere, and none of the obvious solutions worked. Zapping the PRAM didn't help. Restarting into Single User mode and then restarting again didn't help. But one trick did get my internal MacBook camera working again:

Solution to fix your black screen camera on your MacBook:

1) Shut down your Mac.
2) Remove the battery and plug power sources.
3) Hold the on/off Power switch button on your Mac for 5 seconds.
4) Reconnect the battery and turn your Mac back on. That should re-enable your internal iSight camera.

Force start a Time Machine backup

2007-11-02T10:28:00.000-04:00

One extremely simple but useful feature I found missing in Apple's Time Machine backup solution is the ability to perform a backup to an external partition or hard drive right now. Instead, Time Machine picks when it does the backups for you; typically every hour. Why Apple didn't include a small button in the System Preferences for Time Machine that you could click to force an immediate backup of your data is beyond me. It seems like an easy feature to implement and plenty of room in the Prefs pane to add it and keep things clean. I figured there still had to be a way.

I bought a new MacBook the night that Leopard was released. 6-days later Apple announced upgraded MacBook's with faster processors and over double the VRAM. The cool thing is that Apple Stores give you 15-days to exchange a newly purchased product for and upgraded one. They require that you pay a 10% "restocking fee." In my opinion, the upgraded graphics card was worth a 10% exchange cost.

The issue was that I was in a time crunch. I needed Time Machine to perform an updated, full backup of all of my data right away; not 1-hour from now. Two of the three Apple stores in the area were already sold out of the middle-range MacBook. I needed to hurry. At the very least I needed a Terminal command to copy and paste to force Time Machine to perform an immediate backup of my data.

Run this command to force Time Machine to backup data now:

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper >/dev/null 2>&1 &

Open up your Terminal application in Applications: Utilities: Terminal. Then copy and paste the command above at the prompt. As long as Time Machine is turned on and the selected backup drive is connected to your Mac, this command will force Time Machine to start, making a complete backup of all of your data changes since the last time it ran.

Now I'm off to the Apple Store to exchange my MacBook for a faster, upgraded one!

Update: It turns out that Apple added this option by using the menu of the Time Machine icon in the dock. You can click and hold the icon and select "Back Up Now."

Leopard launch video in Boulder, CO

2007-10-27T14:39:00.000-04:00

View a pretty humorous video of Mac users waiting in line to buy Apple's new operating system: Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard." People give their best Leopard impressions. One guy even free flows about it. Location: Boulder, Colorado.

MacUpdate crew at Boulder for Leopard release

2007-10-26T12:48:00.000-04:00

Nate and Joel wil be representing MacUpdate at the Boulder, CO Apple Store this evening for Apple's exciting release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard ($129 retail or $109 using our Amazon.com link). Nate runs the MacUpdate Promo part of the site and Joel founded MacUpdate back in 1996.

We'll be carrying a video camera with us and asking people questions about themselves, why they are excited, and what they think they are in for with Apple's new OS release. Spot Nate and Joel by recognizing some of the MacUpdate apparel. We hope to see you there!

MUPromo extended promo discount store

2007-09-24T15:56:00.000-04:00

MacUpdate has extended the time that users can purchase discounted Mac software on MUPromo. Typically, users have 24-hours to download and trial an application before deciding whether to take advantage of the discount price. But sometimes 24-hours just isn't enough for someone to download and trial a program they aren't already familiar with -- even if its price tag is 50% off.

So developers have struck gold with the idea of extending the normal 24-hour MUPromo and selling any remaining copies at a lower discount. For example, during the first 24-hours you can purchase Navicat for 53% off. But once the clock strikes midnight (east coast USA) that discount closes. But since the Navicat developer is participating in the extended sales program, you still have the opportunity to purchase Navicat for 23% off.

Keep in mind that waiting past the initial 24-hour sale period doesn't mean that the product will make it into the extended promo offers. You're taking a risk by letting the clock run out, so if you're sure you want the application at a big discount, make sure to pick it up during it's main 24-hour promo day.

Check out the new storefront at the bottom of the front page of MUPromo, just below the user comments. Good luck!

Roxio Popcorn for an exclusive 10% discount

2007-09-04T22:06:00.000-04:00

Roxio has given MacUpdate readers an exclusive 10% discount on the popular product, Popcorn. It allows you to burn and duplicate your DVD movies. Version 3.0 was just released days ago. Ahhhh, if only Roxio could get this discount to you readers sooner. ;)

Recommend best user comments

2007-08-22T14:51:00.000-04:00

You now have the ability to help rate user comments as a community on MUPromo. To the right of each user post, you'll notice two new faces. One is smiling and the other is frowning. Click one of the faces to place your vote for that comment. Bad comments will get buried and good ones will rise to the top. As a community, you'll be able to make it efficient for other readers to find the best comment postings when sorting by points. Enjoy!

$49 for 10 Top Selling apps, valued at $433

2007-07-09T09:44:00.000-04:00

MacUpdate Promo has released the biggest Macintosh software discount of the year. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, was quoted saying, "Incredible bundle, I use many of these," in reference to the deal just announced today on mupromo.com.

The bundle consists of the Top 10 selling applications of 2006-2007 that ran on mupromo.com. Developers have teamed up together in hopes of bringing the Macintosh community a bundle of software that has immense value in both the quality of applications and price point. The bundle consists of the following 10 popular titles:

TechTool Pro ($99)
Intaglio ($89)
Little Snitch ($24)
Graphic Converter ($30)
Fetch ($25)
ProfCast ($59)
GarageSale ($29)
Amadeus Pro ($40)
SRS iWOW ($19)
Cocktail ($14)
---------------------------------------
Total Value: $433.82

MUPromo Price: $49.99

The 3 titles in bold are locked in limbo and become unlocked into the bundle when the Macintosh community comes together and reaches each tier of bundle sales numbers. The community has 9-days to reach their ultimate goal, passing the 9,999 mark. The bundle price ends next week on Tuesday, July 17, so be sure to point your browser and pick up your copies at:

http://www.mupromo.com/

After purchasing, an additional bonus feature is thrown in where lucky owners of the bundle get two free coupons that they can give to their friends. If their friends use the coupon link they also get a free 12-month MacUpdate Membership for free (additional $20 value).

"I'm really excited to see such a high caliber of developers come together and support each other, MacUpdate, and the Macintosh community as a whole. We're going into this with full hopes that everyone benefits, taking pieces of the pie and sharing in the fun of reaching the bundle unlock goals together. The developers in particular have been very supportive though the months of planning that has gone into this, and MacUpdate is proud to be both supported, and a supporter, of them," says Joel Mueller of MacUpdate.

MacUpdate Promo is a service that partners with Macintosh developers to bring great indie Mac shareware at more affordable prices to the Macintosh community.

Unveiling of a 10-app bundle sale tonight!

2007-07-08T15:17:00.000-04:00

Be sure to check out the MacUpdate Promo front page for information about the unveiling of a 10-application bundle that is going on sale tonight at midnight! Join in on the live fun and win a free bundle.

Pay for a MacUpdate Promo using PayPal

2007-07-03T14:28:00.000-04:00

MacUpdate Promo used to only support purchasing transactions through major credit cards like Visa, MasterCard and AMEX. Today we added support for PayPal, allowing you to wire money from any of your bank accounts or credit cards, making an automated purchase.

If you have a PayPal account, this makes purchasing a promo as easy as logging in with a click!

Parallels Desktop 3 10% off upgrade

2007-07-02T09:29:00.000-04:00

MacUpdate has another almost exclusive discount. Upgrade to Parallels Desktop 3.0 from 2.x and get a 10% discount.

July 9th event "incredible" to Woz

2007-06-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

July 9 is the day where something big is in the works. Don't just take my word for it, but in an email reply from Steve Wozniak, co-founder and brilliant man of humility, he used the word "incredible ..." when describing what he saw. I'd complete the quote, but it would give away the surprise. Stay tuned for more hints.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw an email from Woz in my inbox. (Thanks Steve).

Exclusive discounts only from MacUpdate

2007-06-12T20:18:00.000-04:00

Developers are starting to come to MacUpdate and offer exclusive discounts on their software. Two very popular software companies have permanent discounts on MacUpdate, most of which aren't found anywhere else on the web. Roxio Crunch is a video converter for your iPod, Apple TV and iPhone. You get an exclusive $5 off. Fetch is a massively popular FTP client. You get an exclusive 10% off. And Roxio's Toast Titanium is a CD/DVD burning software. You get $20 off.

If you're a developer, get ahold of us and we'll sell your software.

Free MacUpdate Membership accounts can disable banner ads

2007-06-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

For many years, MacUpdate has offered a membership service that gave you additional site features: turning off ads, custom layouts, watch lists, email update notifications, daily newsletters and a Desktop application that tells you when software on your Mac is outdated.

Today I'm really excited to announce that non-paying MacUpdate Member accounts can turn off banner ads on the website. This is a big step in usability, geared toward MacUpdate users who enjoy saving time with ultra-fast page loads. Our hope is that more people will sign up for the free MacUpdate Memberships and benefit from its services.

(screenshot #1 of the site without ads. blazing fast loading speeds)
One feature we hope more people will start using is MacUpdate Promo voting. It allows users to vote their favorite software titles into the 24-hour sales discount program of mupromo.com. MacUpdate emails you when products that you voted for go live on the promo, helping connect users like yourself to great deals we create with partnering developers.

There is no longer an excuse not to have a free MacUpdate Membership. If you already have an account, sign-in and go to your preferences page to turn of ads on the site. If you don't already have a membership, then go create a membership now. Enjoy!

(screenshot #2 of the site without ads. blazing fast loading speeds)

Sharing the front page of digg with Paris Hilton

2007-06-08T08:49:00.000-04:00

Parallels 3.0 was released yesterday and MacUpdate submitted the release news to digg, a social news site that empowers users to pick what headlines are interesting and appear on the front page. If you dugg the story, thank you!

Apparently the skills of studying a bunch of SEO (search engine optimization) and social marketing websites paid off. The first story we submitted to digg ended up sharing the front page with the important Paris Hilton jail news.

Have you heard of the "Slashdot effect?" It's where a site like Slashdot links to your website and a ton of people visit that link in a short period of time. Many people that get on the front page of digg tell stories of their webservers crashing because of the high traffic volume. However, we only showed a small spike in traffic last evening. The bandwidth graph for MacUpdate's main webserver is shown below:

Over 2,100 diggs and 160 comments later, it was a fun experience, but not really that beneficial in a tangible sense.

I can't believe I just made some of our bandwidth graph data public! What do you think about organizations that are as transparent as this, publishing real data?

Something big is in the works -- Coming July 9

2007-05-31T09:47:00.000-04:00

On July 9, 2007, MacUpdate is going to launch something that is going to send ripples through the online Macintosh community. It's going to be one of the biggest events of 2007. As a token of fun, a snippet of one of the promotional graphics is previewed to the left of this paragraph. Can you guess what it is?

Multi-word searches are more specific, less results

2007-05-22T13:42:00.000-04:00

We've tweaked the search results behavior on MacUpdate slightly. When searching using more than one word in the query, it now requires all of the words in the query to be present in order to show results. This means that the more words you use in a search, the more specific you're being, and the number of software titles returned will be less and less.

We're hoping this will resolve the issue people had when searching for queries like mp3 player -- where it used to list all entries that had the word "mp3" and also all entries that had the word "player," -- which not every "player" can play the MP3 format. Enjoy!

Vote software into mupromo.com

2007-04-24T15:58:00.000-04:00

MacUpdate has added a little feature that gives you a voice to get software you want to buy at discounts on mupromo.com. Simply visit the info page of any product on MacUpdate and click on the "Vote for mupromo.com discount" link to the right of the "Download Now" link.

If you're logged in as a member, your vote is placed automatically. If you don't have a MacUpdate Membership, then it asks for your email address before placing the vote. Then you receive an email when those titles go on sale during our 24-hour mupromo.com discounts.

It gives larger developers incentive to add include their software in MacUpdate Promos, and it helps keep you connected to promos that interest you. A win-win situation all around.

Advanced search features

2007-04-18T16:43:00.000-04:00

MacUpdate searching just got more powerful by adding an advanced search drawer that slides out of the grey search area when you click on the "more" hyperlink. It allows you to search for Macintosh software using partial words, excluded words, phrases, and required words.

For example, if you wanted to search for MP3 players that are not from Apple, you could search for the phrase "mp3 player" and exclude the word "Apple." You can also use boolean characters right in the main search field. Place quotation marks around a phrase for exact phrase matches. Or place a "+" character in front of a word to require it. Place a "-" character in front of a word to exclude it. Examples:

+mp3 -itunes (searches for mp3 without itunes keyword listings)
+adobe "image editor" (requires the word adobe and the phrase "image editor")
appl* +video (find partial words starting with "appl" and requires the word "video")

Search results are faster

2007-04-04T15:08:00.000-04:00

When MacUpdate first implemented relevant results in the software search, users would typically have to download a results page with over 400KB of file size data. This can take a considerable amount of time to load on non-broadband connections. It used a javascript technology that gathered all of the results into one page, which allowed you to scroll to the next page of results instantly without connecting again to the server. The down side was that you had to download a massive HTML file full of results, even if the listing you were looking for was on the first page of results.

AJAX technologies to the rescue! We've implemented a new standard that reduces the size of the search results page from 400KB to a small 16KB. And when going to the next page of results, there is still no need to reload the entire page, including corresponding ads. It just reloads the results content, saving you a lot of time. Enjoy!

Quickly select/deselect category checkboxes

2007-03-22T15:28:00.000-04:00

A lot of MacUpdate users have emailed us asking for a simple way to quickly select or deselect all of the category checkboxes. I agree that unchecking them one by one can get tedious. And I'm encouraged that so many people wrote in with the same idea.

So guess what? We listen. Notice the "all / none" links just below the Filter button in the category checkbox area. Happy surfing!

Review MUPromo, get your blog linked

2007-03-22T08:42:00.000-04:00

There's a small phenomenon spreading around blog communities right now that builds bridges for paid blog reviews. The most popular one is ReviewMe. It sets a review price of a blog based on traffic, links and PageRank levels. Typically, $250 is the max amount they set, but website owners can manually increase the cost. ReviewMe takes 50% of the cash exchanged ( JohnChow.com claims to have negotiated better terms).

Where would I post my first paid review of MUPromo?

Meet Paul. A bright student that attends sunny Georgia Tech, who although probably disappointed in their early loss in the NCAA tournaments, is a suave, optimisitic guy that is really informed about all things Mac. I've been a reader of his blog for the past 2-3 weeks and like his style. Style is good, but what about traffic?

There are a number of things you can do to check out the popularity of a website. Two of these things are RSS subscribers and Google PageRank. Paul makes it really easy to see how many people are subscribing to his RSS feed by using Feedburner (the same free service we just switched to). He has compared to MUPromo's RSS subscribers.

And Google gives him a PageRank rating of 6 out of 10. This is actually lower that the new mupromo.com site, but that's because we get links from big sites like MacUpdate, MacInTouch and MacMinute. Typically, the idea is to get linked from sites with a higher Google PR than your site. But in this case, there aren't many Mac blogs with a PR7+.

I contacted Paul a few days ago asking if he'd be interested in reviewing MUPromo. And today he posted the very first review of MUPromo. Before he started writing the review, I asked him not to make the review positive just because of the exchange of money. That'd be evil.

How do I get linked on MUPromo's front page?

We're linking to Paul's review on the front page of MacUpdate. And we want to link to yours. Go write a review of MUPromo on your blog and let us know about it in the comments of this blog post. We'll link to it on the front page of MUPromo. Not only will you get traffic from the link but Google will recognize the link coming from a PR7 site, to your blog, helping to increase your Google rank!

Top search queries; best results first

2007-03-16T08:10:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago MacUpdate introduced the relevant search (pictured above). It was built to show the best software titles on the first page of results. I've been studying our Google Analytics traffic reports before and after the launch to measure what people are searching for. The following keywords are the most popular searches made on MacUpdate for the month of March.

stuffit, vlc, onyx, firefox, torrent, itunes, ipod, handbrake, flip4mac, ftp, dvd, camino, parallels, limewire, msn, toast, mac the ripper, mactheripper, games, skype, azureus, mplayer, safari, backup, adium, rar, applejack, messenger, quicksilver, p2p, flash, youtube, vlc, vnc, cyberduck, bittorrent, transmission, divx, office, burn, windows media player, superduper, real player, iphoto, pdf (we reviewed the top 200)...

Did the first page of results display the best listings?

By some whim of programming magic, I was impressed to see all of the search terms above, less two (games & bittorrent), displaying the best matches in the top two listings on the first page of results! While this is encouraging to see, it means there is still room for improvement on general terms like "games" or keyword spelling like "bittorrent" where "torrent" might be the better keyword choice (which was actually a more popular choice anyway).

So we've decided to train someone on the secrets of the relevant search, and show them how to help manually optimize the engine to make sure that the searches made on a daily basis are indeed displaying the best results. He'll start working in a couple of weeks, putting in a few hours a day. I'm excited to see how this improves the search even further.

How does searching on MacUpdate compare?

Out of curiousity I wanted to know how much time I'd save by performing searches on MacUpdate in comparison with the other Mac software sites. So I setup a quick test, searching for "itunes" -- a very popular keyword and probably the most popular application ever built by Apple.


Pages scrolled when searching for "itunes" on other sites
Site             Pages
MacUpdate          1
Download.com       1
VT                 2
iusethis           3
Softpedia          4
Tucows             N/A

MacUpdate and Download.com are the two sites that actually list Apple iTunes on the first page of results. All of the other sites require that you scroll past the first page to find what you're looking for. And the biggest surprise of this test was that Tucows doesn't even list iTunes on their site.

How can users help improve relevant searches?

Post search terms in the comments of this blog entry. If a specific term is giving you issues, we want to know about it here. Your help in communicating this to us will result us working to figure out how to continue to optimize the search engine for you. Many of you have already helped us with improvements by posting over 30 comments a few blog posts ago. Thank you!

Stay tuned next week. Page load time of searches is about to be optimized dramatically!

RSS feed enhancements

2007-03-14T16:58:00.000-04:00

Last week, we decided to start using FeedBurner for our RSS feeds so that we could see how many people are subscribing to the feeds on a daily basis. Because of this switch, and because FeedBurner hosts the feeds on their massive bandwidth, we've enhanced our feeds immensely.

RSS feeds now include the Title, Version, Short Description, License, Full Description and Screenshot. Spread the word that our feeds are the most useful ever!