→ AppFresh Development Preview 5 Bugfix Release 4 (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)

Here we go with another bugfix release for Preview 5, before we’ll finally continue work on the next preview. Some of the changes are related to improvements at our backend of choice iusethis.com and really needed to be pushed public.

We already announced an advanced reporting feature when talking about Aliases. With Preview 5 Bugfix 4 it’s possible to report whatever you think we should know about an application, for example new versions or broken version detection. Search results of the iusethis auto-search feature will be reported automatically, so we can set up aliases at iusethis and reduce unknown state applications or false positives when searching. Please help improve AppFresh and iusethis.com by using this new and helpful feature.

The bugfix 4 release also adds support for Nano software update appcasts which differ from those used by Sparkle and osx.iusethis.com. By supporting Nano some applications listed as Unknown will finally work, such as YummyFTP.

Complete list of changes:

• Added more registered Apple applications (for example Safari and iWorks).
• Added better reporting for broken applications.
• Added support for Nano software update appcasts (used by YummyFTP, for example).
• Added iusethis registration to the setup wizard.
• Added detailed information about iusethis.com to the setup wizard.
• Added advanced support for aliased applications at iusethis.
• Added new main menu action to open the iusethis user profile.
• Improved main menu validation.
• Improved listing of Apple applications not registered in Software Update to be listed as Apple updates (XCode, Interface Builder).
• Fixed rescanning of applications after installing an update.
• Fixed compatibilty issues of Sparkle and iusethis appcasts.
• Fixed possible crash and loop in iusethis auto-search feature.
• Fixed setting of iusethis use counts.
• Fixed handling of applications without versions at iusethis.
• Fixed setting of iusethis attributes for Apple applications.
• Fixed http request settings of redirects.

Posted in AppFresh | 13 Comments »

Today Marcus from osx.iusethis.com published a really great new feature described in his latest blog entry that will help improving the overall AppFresh performance and reduce unknown applications to a minimum. By allowing to configure aliases it is now possible to define more than one name to an entry at iusethis.com, so for example MailAct-On and MailActOn will work for the same application without AppFresh needing to perform an expensive auto-search or requiring you to manually set the correct iusethis id. Aliases will also work for renamed applications, for example Democracy that has been renamed to Miro lately. Furthermore, the use of aliases will hopefully help to reduce the rising number of duplicated entries at iusethis that might be related to AppFresh promoting to easily add unknown applications. We hope this saves you all a lot of time, either configuring your local AppFresh database or to add new applications that are already registered or even to write postings and ask Marcus to remove the duplicates from iusethis.

In order to get aliases configured right we need to know about those. We therefore added a simple reporting feature to the upcoming AppFresh release, that will tell us about manually set iusethis ids or successfully performed auto-search results. Until we release the new version you can also leave your required aliases in the comments, so you can help now to get a better performance out of AppFresh.

Posted in AppFresh | 3 Comments »