Despite a load of work on some iPhone projects, we finally announce the release of AppFresh 0.8.2. It adds some new features and addresses a few important issues, most noticably a startup crash on Mac OS X Tiger. We encourage all Tiger users to update to AppFresh 0.8.2 by downloading it right here.

New features and changes in AppFresh 0.8.2:

• Release Date column added.
• Number of concurrent downloads can be configured in toolbar gear menu.
• Progress indicator is hidden when download is finished.
• Not excluding /Users/Shared by default.
• Download locator displays URL on link mouseover in a new status bar.
• Download locator saves located URLs for downloaded version.
• Bugfixes

Please note, if updating to the new AppFresh version does not work for you, please download the update right here.

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AppFresh 0.8.1 was just published in the stable update feed. The new release fixes most important known issues and adds some minor new features, including more flexible definition of scan locations and an improved version detection. If AppFresh keeps reporting wrong versions for apps such as Opera and Google Earth, please try to reset the version information using the menu action in the main menu.

Complete list of changes:

• Find applications outside /Applications
• Fixed the bug where no applications would be displayed at all
• Improved version detection for some apps
• Restore column ordering/width on launch
• Improved the log console (check out the Window menu)
• Fixed default download folder on Leopard (~/Downloads)
• Skipping properly updates categories
• Fixed category dragging bugs
• Fixed a file system case sensitivity issue
• Fixed a bug in downloading updates
• Fixed inspector release notes/description display after download locator cancel
• Fixed empty progress category bug

Since the release of AppFresh 0.8, we started using a second update feed so you can follow bugfixes and new features more closely. If you experience any problems, please make sure to check out the new nightly update feed, selectable in the preferences.

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With the immediate availability of AppFresh 0.8 we finally released a great set of changes and bugfixes that aim at making AppFresh more stable and usable. The list of installed applications as well as the toolbar have been completely redesigned. AppFresh now lists all applications in a nice table view, making it easy to customize the attributes of interest, to browse groups or to use drag&drop. For downloading and installing updates, AppFresh now uses an integrated download manager, making it easy to add and cancel downloads in the background.

While preparing the upcoming release of AppFresh 1.0 we also started thinking about its licensing. We always wanted to keep AppFresh free while under development and change to some commercial licensing with release 1.0. But at this years WWDC we were encouraged in many talks we had, to go a different way and have been thinking about it ever since. We are not yet sure about all details, but we want AppFresh to be used by as many people as possible. That’s why we want to keep AppFresh free for personal use, even after release 1.0. We will get into more detail by the end of the year, but we still thought it’s of some interest already.

With AppFresh 0.8 we also introduce a way to follow beta versions more frequently. In the preferences you can now choose to follow beta builds.

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We are happy to announce AppFresh 0.7. We have worked hard to make AppFresh more stable and improve integration with our application version information provider of choice iusethis. AppFresh now not only shows which of your applications are marked as used in your profile, it also shows applications from your profile which are not yet on your machine, enabling you to install those applications with a single click. We also added support for grouping applications together in AppFresh, so you can merge 1Passwd and its InputManager or Divx and its Preference Pane, for example. Enjoy!

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→ AppFresh Development Preview 6 (Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 only)

We are very happy to finally announce the new Development Preview 6 release of AppFresh. It comes with a new three-pane user interface that we think is much cleaner and more flexible than the old two-pane layout. The three-pane layout gives the room for new and customizable categories in the left pane. You can now even create your own categories and add applications using drag&drop.

Besides a nearly complete rewrite of the AppFresh core components we added some new features that were requested throughout the last months. We are glad to now support Microsoft AutoUpdate in addition to Apple Softwareupdate, Sparkle and osx.iusethis.com. AppFresh now checks the Microsoft AutoUpdate sources directly without depending on iusethis. Update checking Microsoft applications should therefore become more accurate and stable. If you experience any problems or if you are a Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac user, please contact us in case of problems. Support for native Adobe update checking is being tested, but will likely not be available before the 1.0 release.

Complete list of changes:

• General rewrite of AppFresh core components
• Major speed improvements on scanning applications
• New three-pane user interface without progress sheets
• Added new default categories. Use drag&drop to create a new customizable category
• Added support for Microsoft AutoUpdate
• Added a default group for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac (not MSO 2008!)
• Added support for checking AddressBook plugins
• Added iusethis fallback checking for broken Sparkle appcasts
• Added new update states for network errors and iusethis fallback checks
• The iusethis description of applications can be shown in the inspector
• Fixed a crash reporter bug
• Fixed a bug when AppFresh would not finish update checking
• Fixed some Leopard compatibility issues
• Removed iusethis autosearch
• Improved adding and removing applications from iusethis profile

Note: The underlying data model of AppFresh has changed significantly from previous versions. If you updated from an older version and experience any problems, please try cleaning the ~/Library/Application Support/AppFresh folder and restart AppFresh.

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An important bugfix for the current version of AppFresh was just released. It fixes a memory leak which may cause system hangs on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. We really encourage all users of AppFresh to update to the new 0.5.5.1 release.

→ AppFresh Development Preview 5 Bugfix Release 5.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5)

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This bugfix release contains several fixes for Mac OS X Leopard that are mostly related to Apple’s software update. Also, the crash reporter now works on Leopard, so please continue to use it.

But that’s of course not everything we’ve been working on. For the next preview release of AppFresh, we worked on major improvements to both the interface and AppFresh’s internals. Have a look:

AppFresh Leopard Preview

→ AppFresh Development Preview 5 Bugfix Release 5 (Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5)

You’ll notice the three-pane layout, which will fit nicely into Leopard’s overall UI, but which will also mean a usability improvement for our Tiger users. Another important thing is that we’ve removed most modal dialogs and instead chose to go with a status progress indicator at the bottom of the window. Under the hood, we improved multithreading so AppFresh should be faster and also more responsive for you.

New features of the upcoming Preview 6 will include a more advanced grouping of applications, a customizable application categorization, an improved Microsoft update checking mechanism, installing applications from your iusethis.com profile, a new download manager and much more.

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→ 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.

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Recently I came across the hatom-sparkle project, that aims at extending Sparkle to support Microformats based appcasting. Even though, I am not sure if Microformats per definition are the best choice for enabling applications with auto-update functionality, it’s definitely worth having a look at it. The implementation is still not complete, mainly dealing with difficulties related to the HTML nature of Microformats as "Designed for humans first and machines second".

Right now, AppFresh supports Sparkle and iusethis.com based appcasts as well as Apples very own and closed, non-appcasting based Software Update. So for all applications, except those released by Apple, we first check for Sparkle appcasts and if none is available we check iusethis.com. Using those, there probably is no need to support Microformats based hatom-sparkle in AppFresh, but it would most certainly solve a lot of problems HTML parsing based solutions are facing. The lack of embedded semantics and the need of parsing "raw" HTML is exactly one of the reasons why AppFresh does still not support other updating plattforms, such as versiontracker.com, macupdate.com or apple.com/downloads, although it is the most requested feature since we published our first Development Preview. We think depending on layout based parsing of maybe frequently changing HTML sources you can’t control is not a stable solution, leading to broken functionality and the need of releasing updates on every change to a source. We therefore always wanted to support only a XML/RSS based format, that is..almost perfectly…provided by the appcasting concept. That is why using osx.iusethis.com as the only source for updating information is the best choice for AppFresh, that will get better and more up to date as the appcasting awareness of application developers and the sparkle user base itself rises. No need for buying tools, no need to use wordpress, or whatever…developers might just use iusethis.com to host and manage your appcasts.

The current problem with appcasting from our point of view, is the lack of an overall format defintion or specification. Well, its based on RSS, but there only are implementation specific extensions. Sparkle uses its extensions, iusethis.com uses other extensions and so on. The probably most advanced appcast definition, that is going beyond describing the use of the enclosure tag, is provided by the Sparkle documentation explaining its extensions. There is no easy and documented way for implementing cross-plattform (os x, windows, linux, whatever), multi-architecture (i386, ppc or universal), version-branch (2.0, 3.0, 4.0) or even license (free, commercial) based appcasts. Thomas Keller is writing about some of the issues mentioned and introduces a possible solution that is worth checking out and might be a first step towards a community discussion. It’s not complete either, but it shows the need and the interest in appcasting, that is going beyond Mac OS X. A public available definition and documentation would probably help a lot in increasing the awareness throughout the developer community and keep appcasting from being deadpooled like the codecasting project.

Based on a solid definition of appcasts, it would be more than useful to build a Microformat specification. This way developers and plattforms like iusethis.com could provide feeds and embedded semantics to provide centralized and decentralized updating information. Take appcasting to the next level.

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