Mac OS X Downloads adds Staff Picks, better RSS and AJAX
Apple's Mac OS X Downloads pages got a re-design sometime in the last few days. They've added an AJAX table to the bottom of the page. It defaults to Top 20, and includes Just Added and Staff Picks tabs. They also have links to RSS feeds for each in the table header.Staff Picks (RSS) is entirely new to the site. They used to have 'Hot Apps' but they were only displayed in the sidebar. Now an application will display Staff Pick after its name in lists, if it's a chosen one.
Their RSS feeds also now contain the icon or a small screenshot of the application (in NetNewsWire at least, FireFox seems to only display 1 line of text). I put in a request a long time ago for full screenshots to be included in the Games RSS feed. A small screenshot is better then nothing, but that games section could really use the full screenshot, moreso then the other app sections.
Apple's download site has always been an excellent resource for developers and users alike. I'm glad to see they are continuing to improve on it. There do seem to still be a few bugs in the new site. The 'All Downloads" link in the top left of section pages is broken (or else it's a new page being worked on). And the RSS feeds they link to are hosted at images.apple.com (the one I was previously subscribed to is at www.apple.com).
| Posted by dustin on January 11, 2007 with category tags of Apple shareware games |
Written by dustin
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