As Apple’s App Stores become larger and larger, the difficulty of curating them and organizing apps in a browsable way becomes increasingly difficult. It also becomes increasingly difficult to allow customers to find what they want through simple search terms
To try to keep things tame, the iPad App Store has just gained some useful new filters to help you search through the store’s wares. Now when you’re looking for an app, you can assign a filter to the search thanks to the magic of popovers: Category, Release, Date, Customer Ratng, Prive and Device.
This is an iPad-only tweak for right now, and might stay that way, given the limitations of display real estate on the sub-4-inch line of iOS devices. Interestingly, though, they’re also not available on the Mac App Store. I reckon that will change, especially as the Mac App Store grows.
Another nice little change? Apps you’ve previously bought now have buttons next to them that say “Install” instead of “Buy.” Much appreciated, Apple: I was always worried I’m going to end up buying the same app twice under the old system.
[via MacStories]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
