Comments on: AppFresh Hints and Preview 2.1

By: Alejandro

Alejandro — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:51:11 +0000

*I love it* 8-). Still have to figure what does each thing. However, I don’t know why, it worked differently on my iMac G5 and on my Powerbook. On the iMac everything seems ok (I only scanned the features). While on the PowerBook the preference pane has the Scan widgets is disabled.

By: Thomas Winkler

Thomas Winkler — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:35:57 +0000

We’ll fix this in next preview.

By: Thomas Winkler

Thomas Winkler — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:34:43 +0000

Downloading will be fixed in next development preview. Expect this pretty soon. You will also be able to configure if updates will be unpacked or just copied. DMGs with licens agreements will not be copied in 0.2.1.

Installing is only in private testing right now. Will be available as soon as we are sure it really works

By: Thomas Winkler

Thomas Winkler — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:31:51 +0000

We are quite amazed about the positive feedback, so we try to do our best to make it better.

1.) we probably need custom groups, but it will not be in a development preview release

2.) Yes, we were talking to Arne and Marcus about an improved interface. Hope we can use this soon. iusethis is supposed to be the main db for AppFresh.

3.) Will be added.

4.) Not a problem. Will be probably added as fallback.

The next preview will be out pretty soon with lots of feature in it suggested. Linking apps will not be in there, but you will be able to exclude Apps as well, so you can do this as workaround.

By: Joe Carroll

Joe Carroll — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:24:04 +0000

Great app! About time someone did this. I was just thinking I should write some scripts to comb the VersionTracker RSS feeds to figure out what installed apps need to be updated, but you seem to have saved me the trouble

A lot of great suggestions above (and very nice to see the devs’ open and positive responses to them), but I have a few more to add:
1) The ability to group or sort apps by location to make managing apps stored in non-default locations easier to manage. For example, I maintain an F&OSS collection CD for customers and this would make keeping it up to date much easier.
2) Better integration with iusethis.com to make it easy to add an unknown app to the site, thus ensuring that AppFresh will be able to keep track of the previously unknown app going forward and making AppFresh more and more useful to a wider range of users as time goes on.
3) Key combination shortcuts for adding an app or it’s enclosing folder to the skip/exclude list.
4) Perhaps the additional use of VersionTracker/MacUpdate/Apple Downloads RSS feeds?

BTW, I strongly second the request for the option to link subsidiary and helper apps to their parent app as suggested by Michel above (#7).

By: sporobolus

sporobolus — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 16:15:26 +0000

as a Path Finder user myself, i would not expect an app to support Path Finder used as a “full replacement” for FInder; i leave Finder running but with no open windows, as it is needed for some system expectations; for example, Path Finder does not handle all the Finder Apple Events; i think the better approach, which many apps support, is an option to call Path Finder directly for “reveal in…” type behaviors (DragThing, e.g.); however i would place this at a much lower priority than properly handling multiple app versions

By: Ariel Chinn

Ariel Chinn — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 15:48:00 +0000

First of all, I would like to say that this is an excellent app, and I would love to see further development.
From a preliminary use, I noticed that trying to delete Snapshots sends you into a never-ending circle of validation, I therefore just doesn’t work.

By: ben

ben — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:11:44 +0000

would it be possible to add an ‘update in place’ option? so when a new version is downloaded, it will replace the old version in it’s current location? basically, like the sparkle framework does

By: Mo

Mo — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:57:58 +0000

(Replying to my own comment)

I’ve just noticed that at least one of the files it downloaded does exist in the TemporaryItems folder, but is a .dmg with a license agreement that must be agreed to by the user in order to open it (if I â€˜openâ€™ the .dmg from the command-line, the license agreement dialog appears and the image opens fine if I agree to the terms).

By: Mo

Mo — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:55:12 +0000

I ran AppFresh the first time and it scanned the 150 apps I have installed and downloaded updates for many of them, but after installing the updates I’m left with 28 still reported as needing to be updated. A few of these are misreported version numbers, but several of them are things that the updates never appeared on my desktop for, and attempting to re-download the update results in AppFresh telling me that the update is on my desktop (it isn’t), and the following in my console.log:

unpacking file /private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/TMPExtract PackRat 1.0.5 Update/PackRat.dmg (3540775 bytes)
2007-03-28 13:49:12.159 AppFresh[21197] task failed NSError “Could not unpack file /private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/TMPExtract PackRat 1.0.5 Update/PackRat.dmg” Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=0 UserInfo={
NSLocalizedDescription = “Could not unpack file /private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/TMPExtract PackRat 1.0.5 Update/PackRat.dmg”;
}
2007-03-28 13:49:12.159 AppFresh[21197] queue deactivated

Also, AppFresh seems to â€˜extractâ€™ .pkg/.mpkg files, rendering them a little useless