Today, we upgraded VersionTracker.com with a bunch of new features. While many of the enhancements are performance-related and “under the hood,” our overall goal was to provide a richer, more useful, experience on VT.com, whether you’re browsing or you want to get to specific updates quickly.

We rearranged and expanded our category hierarchy for Mac and Windows, creating what we hope is a more reasonable breakdown of application types, and one that should make it easier for you to compare similar products without having to resort to scanning long lists or performing complex searches. We’ve also exploded our RSS feeds, so that every category and subcategory has a separate feed (the list of all our RSS feeds is here). This should simplify the problem of staying on top of the daily mountain of updates in a more digestible manner. (For those of you keeping score at home, there were 1,267 Mac OS X and 2,511 Windows updates in November, up from 932 and 1,142, respectively, in October.)

At VersionTracker, we've had three levels of site membership for quite some time. Our basic membership, which has been (and remains) free, lets you rate products, leave feedback, set some alerts for software you have installed and includes a few other features. We have also had two levels of paid membership, Plus and Pro, that provide a richer set of features for users who want to manage and stay on top of updates.

Welcome to the VT Blog!

I think it's appropriate to start off our latest venture with the story of Kurt Christensen, who founded VersionTracker more than 10 years ago. At the time, Kurt was a busy system administrator looking for a way to track the endless rush of software updates and releases on the Mac. He started posting a web page each day listing the latest updates, with links to both the developer's site and to the file to download. It seemed useful, so Kurt mailed the link out to his friends.