→ AppFresh Development Preview 3 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

We just finished Preview 3 of AppFresh that hopefully solves most of the important issues of previous versions. We also tried to add the most requested features including the possibilty of manually marking applications as up to date to overwrite wrong version detection. The requested feature of linking applications was not fully implemented, but you can now add single applications to the exlude list.

Please note that some keyboard shortcuts and the toolbar main actions Check and Update have changed. Using AppFresh should be more intuitive now. When first starting AppFresh Preview 3, the cache will be cleared!

Complete list of changes:

• Check and update actions are more intuitive
• Fixed and improved application download and extraction
• Fixed misplaced ad banners from webpages (GraphicsConverter bug)
• Fixed .pkg/.mpkg handling
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed broken context menu keyboard shortcuts
• Improved version detection
• Improved progress sheet descriptions when downloading
• Added menu item to manually mark applications as up to date
• Added menu item to exclude applications
• Added new keyboard shortcuts
• Added AppFresh user agent string for all downloads

Posted in AppFresh | 35 Comments »

If you think you have installed a lot of applications on your machine check out the screenshot found in a japanese blog of an AppFresh user. We do not understand what he thinks about it, but more than 500 installed applications including 41 preference panes is sure more than we had ever expected. If you have installed even more, please send in some screenshots!

I get a little scared if I think what this screenshot will look like as soon as application extensions, plugins and widgets are supported, but i really want to know. We hope to get this done by the end of the week along with other improvements to version detection to get the number of unkown state applications down.

Macの手書き説明書

Posted in AppFresh | 14 Comments »

→ AppFresh Development Preview 2.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

We just finished a new bugfix release to Development Preview 2 that resolves some issues related to overall stability and includes some minor improvements. Please keep up sending in crash reports to help AppFresh get stable.

As I mentioned yesterday I want to post some hints on using AppFresh and maybe tune it a bit to get better results out of it.

1. First of all, and certainly most important, use the preferences to change defaults to your personal settings. Specifying include and exclude paths might lead to a significant scanning speed improvement. If you do not want AppFresh to scan for Apple updates disable it to save some time as well, since this is a very time consuming task.
2. You can add an applications parent path, for example Mail Scripts/*, to your exclude list by using the context menu item Add Parent Folder to Exclude List. This is much straighter and excludes all applications in that directory at once.
3. For some applications you might need to set a different name for an app with that it is registered with at iusethis.com. So for example the iusethis.com name of Disctop needs to be set to Disctop Pro. You might need to check the name by searching for it at iusethis.com yourself and set it using the context menu item Change iusethis.com name of Application. We will add an online database that AppFresh can use to track this automatically as soon one user adds an entry.
4. Double click (or use right / left arrow) on an entry in the application list to show some details. This is no standard functionality so you might need to get used to it. You can also show details by using the context menu item Show Details.
5. Use context menu Skip when Checking for Updates to ignore an application when checking and updating. This might be improved in future versions. Ideas highly appreciated.

I think tuning and setting the iusethis.com name of an application will help you find more updates and reduce applications in state Unknown. For some applications there is no version information set on iusethis.com so AppFresh will not detect new versions and set it to state Unknown (for example VMWare Fusion, Vidalia, Think, …). You can only try to get the maintainers to correctly set version informations.

Posted in AppFresh | 30 Comments »

→ AppFresh Development Preview 2 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

We’ve been using the last days to work on a new version of AppFresh including lots of bugfixes and some improvements to functionality. With the new version AppFresh is much more robust with reading Info.plist files and should stop crashing when scanning installed applications. Thank you for the help to track this down. We also disabled the included InputManager, that is used to make AppFresh the default Software Update application as well as extending the Software Update preference pane. Unfortunately there is a incompatibility with other Input Mangers (at least Saft). You do not need to do anything, it will be removed on next start and Saft will hopefully continue to work as you expect it to.

Complete list of changes:

• Fixed crash when scanning applications with invalid Info.plist
• Fixed downloading of updates
• Downloading of updates is much more comfortable now with some new functions and dialog fixes
• Disabled and removed InputManager due to incompatibilities with Saft (will be enabled when fixed)
• CrashReporter added (please help us by using it)
• New menu action for revealing files in Finder
• New menu action to reset and clean scanned data
• Scanning of existing Snapshots fixed
• Sparkle version comparison fixed
• Improved version recognition
• Improved enabling/disabling of toolbar/menu items
• Progress sheet fixes
• Fixed updating of group by category count numbers
• Fixed getting the right name of some apps

One important thing to know: Some available updates are not detected correctly from the users point of view. For exampple Growl seems to be broken, but in fact its not. There are two problems with Growl. First: there are two different versions defined within the package (localized 0.7.5 and not localized 0.7.6)…thats fixed. Second: the version information set on iusethis.com appcast defines 0.76. The missing dot breaks version detection.

I’ll try to post some basic guide on using AppFresh as soon as possible. Please check out the preferences and context menus when using. You can sure tune a little bit and improve results.

Posted in AppFresh | 14 Comments »

There’s one more thing… I’ve been working together with Thomas Winkler and Maik Szmatulewicz on another Mac application called AppFresh which keeps all applications on your Mac up to date by checking the internet for new releases and makes downloading and installing them a breeze.

Today, we release a first development preview to hear what you think about it. It certainly won’t work for all of your applications yet (listing their state as unknown) and some edges may still be rough, but all in all it works quite well. Since the application has received no public testing yet it won’t download updates and overwrite your old applications but instead extract downloaded files to your desktop, so you can inspect the contents of the downloaded archives and manually drag applications to your Applications folder. This will of course get more comfortable with time.

Currently, we get the information on available updates from the application’s appcast feed (if it has one, that’s great) and additionally check the cool osx.iusethis.com which provides appcasts as well. For application-provided appcasts, we really like what Andy Matuschak has created with Sparkle, since Sparkle-compliant appcasts are our most reliable source of information by far.

You’re welcome to test the application and we’d be really happy to hear your feedback. Please comment on this post or send an email to appfresh@metaquark.de. Thanks!

Edit: Everyone who’s got problems with the stuck panel, please re-download the application.

Posted in AppFresh | 17 Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 8 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

I’ve been able to take some time to finally finish the next beta of Home Zone. Improvements include:

• Bluetooth scans have been improved. You will probably need to re-set all bluetooth triggers, but it should work much better then. I hope this fixes ghost changes of bluetooth triggers that have been reported with Beta 7. Setting the Bluetooth scan interval to 5 – 10 seconds should be no problem.
• An action to set the default printer has been added
• An action to stop the running screen saver has been added. Note that this action can’t circumvent the password dialog.
• An action to synchronize your mobile phone using iSync has been added. This is influenced by the great work of Jesse David Hollington.
• There’s a preference to make trigger state changes lazy. Setting it to a value larger than 0 will require as many scan cycles to confirm state switches for any trigger. This might help with some premature state change problems, but will obviously delay the state change by some cycles.

As always, please feel free to comment on problems, suggestions or things that just work.

Posted in Home Zone | 111 Comments »

Development of Home Zone and Aurora has slowed lately, as I’m currently busy with an internship at Mindquarry, among other not-yet-public things. Mindquarry is a quite young startup, founded by MSc graduates of Potsdam’s HPI (where I’m currently an undergraduate student) and funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures. The company is developing web-based collaboration tools for small to medium teams to share their files, track their tasks, manage a wiki and more. If you’re thinking “hey, that sounds like what 37signals is doing”, you’re certainly not wrong, but this is a seriously enterprisey Cocoon-based approach which is licensed under the MPL. Luckily, I got assigned to work on a native Mac client to replace their Java SWT client (yuck! I completely agree with Jens Alfke) for synchronizing files and having a quick way to check tasks. To get an impression of my workplace, check my corresponding Flickr photoset.

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

→ Home Zone beta 7 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

I’m so sorry I didn’t catch this…

By the way, you will have to re-configure all actions once after updating. This is not a bug, I just didn’t take the time to write code that translates all actions to the new model. Won’t happen again.

Posted in Home Zone | 19 Comments »