Ultimate Explorer 1.3 Launched!

8 Responses to “Ultimate Explorer 1.3 Launched!”

1. vaporiized Says:
   July 18th, 2007 at 1:04 am

   please add these sites as i hope they will a crucial part of your product’s future kickass-id-ness.

   mininova.org (the ultimate torrent list)

   blogsearch.google.com (blogs!)

2. admin Says:
   July 18th, 2007 at 4:17 pm

   We’ll definetely keep those in mind. Though I think we have the blog search already under Google… If we don’t, we’ll put it in.

   Thanks for the feedback!

3. Vikram Says:
   July 22nd, 2007 at 10:40 am

   This is an exceptional program. Thank you for making it. But its precisely because its so awesome and useful that I feel compelled to point out the two flaws that prevent it from being absolutely perfect.

   The most popular and useful sites are Google, Wikipedia and to a lesser extent, piratebay. Wikipedia is the number one way to find out information about anything. And thepiratebay/torrentspy is the best way to get anything.

   Yet when snap search is enabled, it doesn’t have a button for Wikipedia, piratebay or yahoo. The six buttons it has are amazon, digg, drugstore, google, youTube and digg. Having a button for wikipedia is absolutely essential.

   I think it would make perfect sense if the six sites on the snap search included at the very least, Wikipedia, and if at all possible, also piratebay.

   Plus, I think it would make the most sense if the six snap search sites were listed in the order of most popular…

   Google, Wikipedia, ebay as the top 3 buttons on snap search, in that order, and youTube, digg (or amazon) and thepiratebay as the bottom three in that order. This way, the most popular sites are the first buttons.

   The second flaw in the program is that it doesn’t fit in perfectly with the other windows gadgets. All the good windows gadgets are colored a very dark shiny black like the rest of windows. This program is instead colored brush metal black which while close still looks off.

   Plus, the little blue “change search” buttons sticks out like a sore thumb on object dock. It would look better if it was a very light grey or off white or something.

   Please change these minor things so that this program can be considered absolutely perfect.

4. Vikram Says:
   July 22nd, 2007 at 10:47 am

   Just wanted to add, mininova is indeed superior to thepiratebay.

   I don’t see the point in having two different torrent sites. But it makes sense to perhaps replace thepiratebay with mininova.org

   But the most important thing is to delete two buttons on snap search and replace them with buttons for Wikipedia and mininova and to add a skin based on the same shiny dark black found on vista that also doesn’t have the blue.

5. admin Says:
   July 22nd, 2007 at 7:18 pm

   Thanks for the comments, believe me, we are debating quite a bit of similar things right now for the 1.4 release (which may take some time to come out). I do like the theme idea, I’ll look into maybe seeing if I can adapt it to work for the UE.

   The snap search is customizable from the default. If you go into the settings under the Search tab, there will be a Snap Search tab with the engines checked off, simply check whichever engines you want and hit ok.

   I’ll look into using MiniNova, We’re probably not going to replace The Pirate Bay with it, but we might add it in addition (Perhaps a Torrent search engine with multiple sites you can search underneath might work out for the best in this category). Again, something we’ll consider for future release.

   The reason the top band to change engines is in bright blue is because while most people will know that it’s there, not everyone notices right off the bat. In fact, originally, that band was a bit darker and fit in a little better in the original release, it was changed later on by suggestion to make it easier to see.

   In certain respects, we can theme the gadget to help it blend in better with the sidebar, though we can only do that so much as a few images are concerned, the overall layout and size of the gadget are kind of going to stay similar to what they are now. Again, we are debating quite a bit in that regard, but I have a feeling that this gadget will retain quite a bit of it’s original look, though it might be a good time to revisit and revamp it to accomodate more to the interface.

   Thanks again for your comments! They are much appreciated!

6. Vikram Says:
   July 23rd, 2007 at 11:39 am

   Thank you very much for you quick response and for the truly excellent program. It’s my second most used application on Vista and I didn’t even realize that snap search is customizable.

   I will look forward to the more Vistaesque dark shiny black skin in 1.4. It would be nice, if at all possible for that particular skin to have the blue “change search” be changed to a dark gray.

7. Chinny Says:
   August 18th, 2007 at 4:42 am

   Feature Request!

   Like you have done with the ebay and amazon search tools could you add the option to search Pricerunner.co.uk for us brits?

   Would be much appreciated and thanks for the most must have gadget around

8. admin Says:
   August 19th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

   We’ll look into it, though odd as it may seem, I’m not sure that PriceRunner has a feed for their UK site yet. Again, we’ll look around and send them an e-mail to see if they are planning on having one installed.

   The odd things is that their api feed is managed by a British company so it really makes no sense why they don’t have a UK feed yet… We’ll see.