→ AppFresh Development Preview 5 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)
It took some time, but here is AppFresh Development Preview 5. We mainly added the functionality that was requested the most during the last two months and fixed a lot of reported issues. The most important new feature is the automatic installation of updates after downloading if the situation is clear and AppFresh considers it safe (the old application will be moved to the thrash, should you need to recover it). This will not work for all applications yet (InputManagers, for example), but it sure makes updating a lot easier. We also integrated your iusethis.com profile to make some of the functions and information you are used to from their website available in AppFresh. You can now add applications to your profile and remove them, see licensing information and use counts, and define license filters for commercial updates. We really encourage you to register at iusethis.com to use the new functionality and improve the service itself… after all, it’s free!
One of the biggest issues still is the number of unkown applications and version schemes. This new release aims at reducing the number of unknown apps by automatically searching for unknown apps and is now using more descriptive application states. New states include "Not listed at iusethis.com", "Version * not recognized" and "Broken feed". This should enable you to find out what’s wrong and maybe add applications to iusethis.com yourself or tell us about broken version schemes. The second new feature enables AppFresh to find applications at iusethis.com by searching for it if there is no direct match. If it finds a good match it automatically sets the iusethis identifier and checks for updates. The new identifier will be shown in brackets after the application’s name in the main table. Please tell us about false positives!
Last but not least, we’d like to welcome Louis on our team. He’s been doing some work on our icons, and some of that is already visible in this preview. Thanks, Louis!
Complete list of changes:
- Added installing of applications updates after downloading.
- Added IUseThis profile support including "i use this" and "stop using" actions for applications.
- Added licensing and universal binary information to the applications inspector.
- Added a basic license filter to allow/disallow commercial license updates per application.
- Added category for used applications at IUseThis.
- Added menu to open developers webpages for applications.
- Added dialog for configuring IUseThis settings and unstable features at the first start.
- Added a search for applications at IUseThis if not found directly.
- Added two new menu items to open the AppFresh install logfile and the Software Update.log.
- Added a warning before Reset and Remove all Applications is executed.
- Added support for iPhoto plugins such as FlickrExport.
- Improved and more descriptive application states.
- Improved application category icons and overall layout/coloring/contrast.
- Improved version detection for version numbers starting with dots.
- Improved version detection of revision numbers.
- Improved error handling for sparkle applications with broken appcasts. Now IUseThis will be checked as fallback.
- Improved user interface by using panels instead of sheets.
- Improved and cleaned up menus.
- Fixed rescanning of applications and detection of new versions without restarting AppFresh.
- Changed toolbar Check action to always check for updates on all available applications.
- Fixed removing of installed apple system updates.
- Fixed the IUseThis profile generator/maker for large numbers of appplications.
- Fixed resolving of XML entities when parsing appcasts.
- Fixed menu validations.
- Fixed reopening of the main window.
- Fixed disappearing progress.
- Fixed timeouts when checking for updates.
