It's that time of the year again, some celebrate Festivus or Kwanza, some get to build snowmen and others throw shrimps on the barbie and surf at the beach. The Aminet team however, spend the season working for you, always trying to improve Aminet. This is what has happened since last time:



- We've got yet another mirror, the first US one after the new world Aminet actually. us2.aminet.net. For now it's a HTTP only mirror.

- You can now search Aminet packages by their content. Yes, that means you finally have a way to find out which package a file on your harddrive originated from. Excellent way for developers to get hold of specific header files or source code files too.

- Search results show download numbers per package, that means you can now list your favourite categories, platforms, authors and similar and order them by popularity. This complements the already implemented download stats that we announced last time.

- Search in readme (and content) has been speed up and should take from 0-5 secs, rather than 20-60 secs as before.

- Simple search should also now behave more like the classical Aminet search, when receiving search terms it tries matching it to package name, path or description.

- We've added links to our public IRC channel #aminet and to the mailing list interface at the services page.

- And last, but not least, a new web upload interface has been carved out. We've tried to make one that is easier to use based on feedback and focused on it being intuitive. You can choose wether you want to upload a readme file separately or create it with an easy-to-use form. Thanks to everybody testing it, and don't hesitate in giving us your comments about it.

- In addition there is of course quite a few bug fixes and small improvements, if you want to know more, check out the changelog.

As a last note, it's worth noticing that in 2006, we have surpassed the amount of uploads from 2005, 2004, 2003 and even 1992, which was the year Aminet started.

Currently there is only about 130 files missing from reaching another milestone, namely the 2002 number. The question is though wether that is possible during the last two weeks of the year...

Yours,
The Aminet team.