Following our call for far-more-than-remotely-reasonable-number-of-applications-installed screenshots, Joachim Bengtsson has sent in a new record that’s nearly 300 applications ahead of the last featured screenshot. Congratulations, Joachim, and keep on downloading!

Posted in AppFresh | 2 Comments »

Just in time for the Apple Design Awards deadline, I nearly finished version 3.3 of Aurora. One of the more important improvements is (limited) iPod support, so you can now leave your iPod connected over night and play music from it in the morning, in case you’re traveling with your notebook and left your full library at home. It’s limited because this will only work when iTunes itself can play the music on your iPod, which is the case when disk usage is enabled (all models) and “Manually manage music and videos” is enabled (for non-shuffle iPods). So far, I’ve only been able to test the feature with a 5th generation iPod and a 2nd generation iPod shuffle (how many more do you need, anyway), but I’d love to see more reports on this before I release a final version. So, if you’re interested, check it out and report on your findings below. Thanks!

→ Aurora 3.3 beta (1.3 MB, Mac OS X 10.4 only)

All improvements:

• Added iPod support (requires: disk usage enabled, manual mode)
• Added notes window with wake from sleep hints
• Added swedish localization (courtesy of Robert Ilijason)
• Improved “Tomorrow” button, it’s “Today” between midnight and 4am
• Improved Applescript support (not complete yet)
• Improved fallback player reliability
• Improved toolbar icon (the sheep’s now officially cuter than Knut, thanks to Louis)
• Fixed time zone problems (alarms are always in local time now)
• Fixed fallback player volume bug
• Fixed iTunes library file name bug

Posted in Aurora | 2 Comments »

Woohoo! I guess I’m going to WWDC07! Thanks, Apple!

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

→ AppFresh Development Preview 4 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of AppFresh Development Preview 4, which includes the following new features and bugfixes:

• An improved version detection algorithm for greater precision (please continue to report issues with applications that are not detected correctly)
• Support for Widgets and Plugins (Inquisitor, Mailtags, Saft and the like)
• iusethis profile generation (works like imakeprofile for now)
• Fixed crash when creating snapshots
• Added “Up to date” category
• After downloading: don’t put single files in their own directory, just rename them
• Added Apple Developer Tools to default include path

Please feel free to comment on problems, suggestions or things that just work.

Posted in AppFresh | 50 Comments »

While Thomas is headed off to Thailand for a three-week vacation and will probably have a pretty good time there, I’m busy finishing AppFresh Development Preview 4 for release. One of the biggest challenges is to get version detection and parsing right for as many applications as possible to be able to compare your currently installed version to the latest available version in a meaningful way and make the Unknown category a bit emptier.

Version numbers come in different fashions, from simple (“2.3″, “1.5.5″) to pretty complex (“R 2.4.1 GUI 1.18″, “0.8.6a”), they appear in multiple places and variations in your installed application and on the internet (osx.iusethis.com) and often, there is also a revision or build number (“4038″, “327″) that might be useful. AppFresh tries to break down all information it finds and combines the pieces to get the most precise version information for comparison. Some problems cannot be solved, e.g. when the application bundle contains a revision number only, like “4038″, and iusethis only knows about the version number, like “1.5.5″. There’s no way for AppFresh to know which revision belongs to which version, therefore it can’t compare them and will list the application as “Unknown”.

Even if the information is there, it can be difficult to break it down into usable pieces, as there is no standard for defining version numbers. Apple has a Tech Note detailing how version numbers should look like, but a lot of developers don’t follow that at all and come up with their own creations, so the number of these patterns that AppFresh has to understand is larger than we originally thought. AppFresh currently uses complex regular expressions to match certain patterns and I’m trying to improve these expressions so more patterns can be matched. As we can’t install all applications to test the whole version parsing algorithm, we added a built-in “Report as broken” function to AppFresh, which provides us with selective data on failing applications but which isn’t used very much. To be able to test and improve version parsing, I’d like to build a database of version strings which can be automatically matched as I modify the regular expressions.

That’s why I built a small tool which you can run once on your machine to generate a profile of all version strings that occur within all applications in your Applications folder. After double-clicking the tool, the profile will be generated and placed on your Desktop in a file called “Collected Versions” (this might take a few seconds, sorry for the
rudimentary “interface”). To submit the collected information, please upload the generated file here (needless to say, the profile contains no personal information and we don’t save anything but this file). Your contribution is greatly appreciated, especially if you have lots of not-so-widely-used applications on your system. Thanks for your help!

Update: I’ve updated the tool to run on PowerPC and include ~/Applications.

Posted in AppFresh | 11 Comments »

A little more than a week ago, we released the first Development Preview of AppFresh in order to find out what you Mac users think and what you have to say about it. The response was quite overwhelming. 15,000 people downloaded AppFresh in the last days, 100 blogs from all over the world picked up the new application and sites like Digg, Arstechnica and TUAW made our server collapse.

To all of you: thanks alot for your interest and your feedback! It provided a good insight to what you expect from this app, and confirms our approach of releasing early and releasing often. As time permits, we’ll try to keep up the development pace to realize the long list of features that are still waiting to be included.

Also, we’d very much like to thank Arne and Marcus from osx.iusethis.com for providing open access to their platform. Without this great application database AppFresh wouldn’t be able to find nearly as many updates as it does currently. Iusethis integration in AppFresh is still far from done, and we’re working with Arne and Marcus to provide a much better combined Iusethis/AppFresh user experience that will let you manage your Iusethis profile from within AppFresh, among other things.

Not everyone was so happy about AppFresh, though. MacUpdate, the self-proclaimed #1 Most Popular Macintosh-only software website, silently refused to list AppFresh in their database; it almost seems their subscription-based MacUpdate Desktop application can’t take competition. Needless to say, they’re free to list or reject whichever applications they want and we don’t really blame them for it. Let’s just see how this evolves…

On the Development Preview 4 front, we’re currently working on support for Dashboard Widgets and Plugins (Inquisitor, Mailtags, Saft and the like), improved version parsing and fixes for the few crash reports that are coming in and hope to release it sometime this week.

Other features that are planned for future releases are automatic update installation after downloading, the already mentioned iusethis profile integration, improved snapshots handling (including the ability to transfer a snapshot of all your applications to another machine or system), more precise control over what updates will be installed (alpha/beta releases, minor releases, major releases only) and whatever great ideas you mention along the way.

Posted in AppFresh | 7 Comments »