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.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Wow! I am the first to post !
Sorry to not have posted that before but I was working on some translations!
Here is the “audit” for the 0.5.3 version of AppFresh!
Before all :
Real Total of Apps : 491
Shown Total (All) : 403
Updates : 7
UpToDate : 315
Unknown : 81
First step, changing IUseThis Identifier :
Real Total of Apps : 491
Shown Total (All) : 403
Updates : 12
UpToDate : 346
Unknown : 45
Second step, after grouping apps :
Real Total of Apps : 491
Shown Total (All) : 370 *
Updates : 3
UpToDate : 339
Unknown : 28
Ideally :
I should only have 2 (real) updates because 2 of the 3 updates were linked to DivX as it’s just possible to group in the same folder for the moment (I hope !). And for that one (and others), the wish is to have a “free numbering” .
And the number of Unknown apps would be only 18 if I could have the ability to group 2 apps on the Applications folder (they don’t want to work on a subfolder), if I could have the ability to link plug-ins with apps, widgets with apps, a certain number of apps in a folder with a main apps (I am thinking of the Intego’s apps where some apps are with VirusBarrier, some others with NetBarrier, and some other with (if I remember well) with NetUpdate) !
Where is the option to (un)filter known unsupported applications in the exclude part of the preferences ?
September 6th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Which iusethis identifiers did you set manually? We should add aliases so you don’t need to set those again.
Advanced grouping or creating packages is planed in one of the next versions.
September 7th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I think the major ones were : the MailScripts, Stuffit Deluxe, Missing Sync for (in my case) Palm OS. I don’t know how you will implement the aliases and what they but in the case of the MailScripts I don’t think it will help too much as they have a different name… but they have the same version number!
I think :
- a search by version (ou release) number would be greatly welcome in AppFresh,
- a certain “uniformity” in the version number display would also be great because when you have a site (Macupdate or Version Tracker or other) that tells you :”Program X is updated to version Y” and AppFresh display is r(elease) Z, how can you be sure that you really have to update !?
-Another problem is that AppFresh doesn’t seem to read again the version number when, after having done the update of a program, I ask it to check the update with the first item of the contextual menu! I have to quit (normally) AppFresh and restart it to “see” the update !
The advance grouping will be welcome as the package creation !
Michel