News

When Software Attacks 2007-02-25 02:51:48

A lot of publicity has developed over the weekend about claims by the developer of Display Eater. First they said it might intentionally delete your home directory, then they said it wouldn't (also giving a date, 2/7/07, that doesn't coincide with any release version we have on record). MacUpdate seems to have gone as far as removing Display Eater from its listing. The truth is that while the Mac may not have a malware problem like Windows, it does get a fair amount of "questionable" software releases. We've been thinking for a while about adding a feature to the database that at least flags bad software. If you have any thoughts, pro or con, now would be a fine time to leave feedback.

Web Page With RSS Smarts 2007-02-17 23:43:07

One nice thing about RSS feeds is that they let you keep track of what you've seen already and what you haven't. Surprisingly few web sites allow you to do the same thing, and the ones that even come close usually require you to have an account of some kind. We instead got the idea into our heads that we could add that to our site with just a little bit of JavaScript and a cookie. So if you now look at the little hour markers to the right of the releases, you should see a soothing blue background behind the one that represents the last full hour of releases you saw. If that isn't obvious enough, please give feedback and we'll try to find a better way to indicate it.

How We Roll 2007-02-03 09:33:33

We've picked up a lot of new users over the years, so this might be a good time to explain how MAT is designed to work. Every 15 minutes, we check the feeds of a bunch of Mac software sites. If they haven't been modified we do nothing, but if they have we do a little processing of the data and add the announcements to our local database. At roughly the top of every hour we update the main page with a full 24 hours of Mac software releases and the RSS feed with the last 12 hours, and on weekdays we also update the main page around the half hour, too. What that all means is that while you might not be able to exercise fine control over the exact part of the hour when you read a feed or visit the site, there is really no reason to stop by more frequently than every 15 minutes. Then again, what do we know? If you happen to have a 10 Mac LAN and thought it would be useful to have MAT available on all of them, then we'll just be shutting up now. :-)

Dr. Aloha or: How I Learned to Stop Reloading and Love the MAT 2007-02-02 09:17:32

Did you know that January has 44,640 minutes in it (31 * 24 * 60)? Now you do! Did you know that one IP hit us 28,812 times last month (in the neighborhood of hawaii.res.rr.com)? Now you do! That works out to about once every minute and a half. While we appreciate that kind of love for Mac software, stay tuned tomorrow to see why that's about an order of magnitude too eager.