Tuesday, April 24, 2007 by Joel Mueller

Vote software into mupromo.com

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.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 by Joel Mueller

Advanced search features

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")

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 by Joel Mueller

Search results are faster

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!