Apple’s Support Downloads area has been completely redesigned. It now features an updated Web 2.0 look, consistent with product-page changes on apple.com in recent months.

My favorite feature is the ability to now browse by product. You can quickly, say, drill down to iWork ’08 updates only. I haven’t checked how far back it goes. My one complaint is that doesn’t allow you to filter by specific version. For example, chosing Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, lists all updates released for Jaguar… not just the ones you need to be up-to-date.

This means that my Mac OS Tune-Up page is still needed, for those wishing to roll their own AutoPatcher-style admin update disc… but, it’s still an excellent update to a part of apple.com that really needed to be updated.

One final note that I noticed, it appears Apple has gone back to mandating the support.apple.com domain name. For those of you that have sat on Apple’s web site for a decade, Apple first used info.apple.com (long dead), and then switched to support.apple.com. Now, for SEO purposes, Apple rolled that into apple.com/support (which helped before Apple was able to be in the top 10 sites on the web in terms of traffic). So, now that Apple has accomplished that, they’ve moved back to support.apple.com.

It sure does makes MechaWorks URL changes look simplistic in retrospect…

Oh, and did I take my usual 10 minutes to mention that Apple version numbers, updates, and maintenance schema are about fifty thousand times better than Microsoft? No? Oh well, next time…

Update: Some redundant updates have been pulled from the hierarchial downloads view, but a lot are still there… my advice would be for Apple to go back give users an option to filter, defaulting to showing only updates that the user would need to take a released version to the latest branch.