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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 1:28 pm and is filed under AppFresh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.