Brief Hands-On Report--MacUpdate.com Released MUMenu v2.0 for Immediate Software Update Notices

Joel Mueller runs a great free software update service at MacUpdate.com. His free software, MUMenu, places an icon in your Mac's menu bar that, when clicked, drops a menu listing the most recent additions to MacUpdate.com. The default icon even automatically turns golden when new updates have been added. On 7/11/2002 we favorably reviewed Joel's 1.0 version of MUMenu for Mac OS X. He just released MUMenu v2.0 with some substantial improvements.

MUMenu 1.x was a Haxie that used Unsanity's Menu Extra Enabler software. While it worked fine for us for the past couple of years, MUMenu 2.0 is a regular application that does not need the enabler. Version 2.0 adds the following:

• Completely redesigned MUMenu and turned it into a regular application. (Note for fellow developers: MUMenu's menu bar item is no longer a NSMenuExtra. Instead, it is a NSStatusItem now.)
  
• You can now specify your own menu bar icons by simply dragging them to the respective image wells in MUMenu's new preferences window.
  
• Improved MUMenu's way of checking for updates. This results in a smaller network bandwidth footprint.
  
• You can now force MUMenu to check for updates by double-clicking on its application icon. This also works by relaunching MUMenu via hot key. Just use your favorite hot key utility to assign a hot key to MUMenu.
  
• Removed the option to search MUMenu for the current clipboard contents directly from MUMenu's pop-up menu. Instead, the "Search MacUpdate.com..." input field will default to your clipboard contents if these appear to be applicable.

We uninstalled MUMenu 1.x and Menu Extra Enabler, then downloaded and installed MUMenu 2.0 by just copying the application to our Applications folder. Upon launching MUMenu an icon appears in the menu bar with a drop down menu listing available software updates. One can also use the preferences to set MUMenu to launch automatically at log in.

The new interface is cleaner. "Major" updates are now highlighted in red on the menu list instead of having a dash in front of the listing. The preferences allow one to set the frequency of automatically updating from every 30 minutes to every 3 hours. MUMenu 2.0 can be forced to update by double-clicking its application icon (not the menu icon). One can also set the MUMenu 2.0 icons by dragging and dropping images into the "regular" and "updated" image wells in the preferences.

With several hours use, MUMenu 2.0 seems to work every bit as well as the previous versions and with less bandwidth usage. Aside from getting direct email from software authors or Apple Software Update preference pane, MUMenu is usually the first place we learn of the existence of new software updates. We think you will like it.