→ AppFresh Development Preview 5 Bugfix Release 2 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

Before we continue working on a tighter iusethis.com integration, we are happy to release another bugfix to Preview 5. It also brings some new features that did not make it in the last bugfix, but we thought it’s about time.

New in Preview 5 Bugfix 2 is grouping of applications within a folder and its subfolders. It’s not yet possible to create flexible packages, but it sure helps reducing Unknown state entries for lots of software packages (such as Microsoft Office 2004 or Adobe and Macromedia products). Groups are always using the highest version available of all applications within the directory selected in the grouping dialog and can be unpacked if needed. Please feel free to submit feedback, since we are planning more related advanced features. Please note that non-bundle applications are now scanned and listed (Spotlight needed)! This might lead to a significant raise of applications counts.

Another new feature helps to correctly set the iusethis.com identifiers. When changing the iusethis.com identifier, AppFresh first performs a search and provides the results in an auto-completion enabled combobox. So its not needed to visit and search iusethis.com.

Please, make sure to check out the preferences. There are two new options that have been requested thoughout the last month. For all of you with lots of apps, there is a new compact list style that makes it possible to display more list entries at once. Another new option disables the installing of updates that need to be located by the Download Locator. Enabling this option will help run complete updates without user interaction.

Complete list of changes:

• Added grouping of applications in one folder.
• Added auto completion for changing iUseThis identifiers with search results.
• Added preferences option compact list style.
• Added scanning and handling of non-bundled applications.
• Added support for kernel extensions (yet without filesystems)
• Added toolbar action iUseThis Profile.
• Added auto-hiding of iUseThis categories if no credentials are set.
• Added preferences option to ignore updates needing the Download Locator.
• Improved checking for iusethis.com "Server down" messages and setting to state "Broken feed".
• Improved caching to improve overall list preformance.
• Improved iusethis.com auto-search.
• Improved internal Core Data handling.
• Fixed generating of application names containing dots (for example Last.fm)
• Fixed installing of some PreferencePanes.
• Fixed removing of old versions when iUseThis identifier is changed.
• Fixed setting of iUseThis state.
• Fixed updating of iUseThis category counts.
• Fixed marked as up to date applicatins category assoziation (now Up to date)
• Fixed inspector resizing issues.
• Fixed sorting by state.
• Fixed some more wrong capitlization.
• Fixed displaying application name in the Download Locator window.
• Fixed alignement of dates in the first row of a category.
• Fixed Safari 3 problems with Download Locator.
• Fixed handling of pre version schemes.
• Reverted Download Locators always-on-top window settings.
• Reverted to using sheets to display the progress.
• Removed preferences option to exclude unsupported applications.

Posted in AppFresh | 5 Comments »

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

After an all busy month there finally is a new release of AppFresh. We’ve been trying hard to get as much done as possible, but real life is hitting hard these days (and well… it’s summer). You probably read about other blockers; Jonas visited WWDC07 and I needed to do some travelling as well, including a great stay at this years Reboot 9.0 at Kobenhaven.

We titled this release a bugfix release, because not many new features made it into. There have been some major issues with Preview 5 that have been fixed before we’re heading towards an outstanding Preview 6 (it sure will be taking iusethis.com integration to the next level). The most important fixes are a fallback scanner for systems where Spotlight is disabled and Widget detection for iusethis.com entries. With the new version AppFresh tries to find out if a local widget is tagged as widget at iusethis.com, so it does not mess up applications and widgets that have the same name (for example Photo Drop, thank you Bjørn Bojesen). In case AppFresh finds an iusethis.com entry for a local widget that is not correctly tagged it will set the state to "Not tagged as widget at iusethis.com". The entry owners at iusethis.com should therefore always add a "widget" or "dashboard" tag. Users probably should start reporting as well.

Complete list of changes:

• Added Spotlight fallback in case it’s disabled.
• Added ~/Applications to default scan locations.
• Added new sort by filter "State" in the main window.
• Added an alert panel for using "Make iUseThis profile"
• Added widget categorization and detection.
• Added actions to Help menu for opening the website, the blog and sending a mail.
• Added word splitting to improve iusethis.com auto search.
• Added category "Not Using"
• Added possibility to disable iusethis.com auto search per application.
• Added support for SIMBL plugins by default.
• Added iusethis.com credentials loading from Internet Keychain item in the wizard.
• Fixed iusethis.com login using E-Mail addresses.
• Fixed resetting of iusethis.com identifiers manually set for an application.
• Fixed apple updates clearing after an installation (clear the cache before this takes effect).
• Fixed rescanning of applications that are deleted while AppFresh is running.
• Fixed update checking of applications with special characters.
• Fixed adding iusethis.com version mess up for apple updates.
• Fixed categorization of applications in case only one apple application was found.
• Fixed menu entries appearing as “Untitled”.
• Fixed overall iusethis.com credentials handling, including deletion, loading and saving to keychain.
• Fixed progress so it’s a sheet again until we have a better solution.
• Fixed alignement of main table cells for sizes greater than 1300px.
• Fixed downloading/installing if unpacking is disabled in preferences.
• Fixed handling of applications within applications so they will be ignored.
• Fixed folder moving if target exists when downloading/installing.
• Fixed handling of broken download URLs.
• Fixed crashes related to missing system tools.
• Fixed overwritten minimize keyboard shortcut.
• Fixed the download locator so it’s always in front.
• Fixed loading credentials from keychain returning no password in some cases.
• Fixed some typos.
• Fixed reported crashs.
• Updated toolbar icons.
• Started to work on Leopard compatibilty (should be working mostly).

Still open is the integration of Kernel Extensions such as MacFUSE and others. If you miss anything else, please leave a comment.

Posted in AppFresh | 23 Comments »

→ 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.

Posted in AppFresh | 58 Comments »

Following our call for far-more-than-remotely-reasonable-number-of-applications-installed screenshots, Joachim Bengtsson has sent in a new record that’s nearly 300 applications ahead of the last featured screenshot. Congratulations, Joachim, and keep on downloading!

Posted in AppFresh | 2 Comments »

→ AppFresh Development Preview 4 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of AppFresh Development Preview 4, which includes the following new features and bugfixes:

• An improved version detection algorithm for greater precision (please continue to report issues with applications that are not detected correctly)
• Support for Widgets and Plugins (Inquisitor, Mailtags, Saft and the like)
• iusethis profile generation (works like imakeprofile for now)
• Fixed crash when creating snapshots
• Added “Up to date” category
• After downloading: don’t put single files in their own directory, just rename them
• Added Apple Developer Tools to default include path

Please feel free to comment on problems, suggestions or things that just work.

Posted in AppFresh | 50 Comments »

While Thomas is headed off to Thailand for a three-week vacation and will probably have a pretty good time there, I’m busy finishing AppFresh Development Preview 4 for release. One of the biggest challenges is to get version detection and parsing right for as many applications as possible to be able to compare your currently installed version to the latest available version in a meaningful way and make the Unknown category a bit emptier.

Version numbers come in different fashions, from simple (“2.3″, “1.5.5″) to pretty complex (“R 2.4.1 GUI 1.18″, “0.8.6a”), they appear in multiple places and variations in your installed application and on the internet (osx.iusethis.com) and often, there is also a revision or build number (“4038″, “327″) that might be useful. AppFresh tries to break down all information it finds and combines the pieces to get the most precise version information for comparison. Some problems cannot be solved, e.g. when the application bundle contains a revision number only, like “4038″, and iusethis only knows about the version number, like “1.5.5″. There’s no way for AppFresh to know which revision belongs to which version, therefore it can’t compare them and will list the application as “Unknown”.

Even if the information is there, it can be difficult to break it down into usable pieces, as there is no standard for defining version numbers. Apple has a Tech Note detailing how version numbers should look like, but a lot of developers don’t follow that at all and come up with their own creations, so the number of these patterns that AppFresh has to understand is larger than we originally thought. AppFresh currently uses complex regular expressions to match certain patterns and I’m trying to improve these expressions so more patterns can be matched. As we can’t install all applications to test the whole version parsing algorithm, we added a built-in “Report as broken” function to AppFresh, which provides us with selective data on failing applications but which isn’t used very much. To be able to test and improve version parsing, I’d like to build a database of version strings which can be automatically matched as I modify the regular expressions.

That’s why I built a small tool which you can run once on your machine to generate a profile of all version strings that occur within all applications in your Applications folder. After double-clicking the tool, the profile will be generated and placed on your Desktop in a file called “Collected Versions” (this might take a few seconds, sorry for the
rudimentary “interface”). To submit the collected information, please upload the generated file here (needless to say, the profile contains no personal information and we don’t save anything but this file). Your contribution is greatly appreciated, especially if you have lots of not-so-widely-used applications on your system. Thanks for your help!

Update: I’ve updated the tool to run on PowerPC and include ~/Applications.

Posted in AppFresh | 11 Comments »

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.

Posted in AppFresh | 7 Comments »

→ AppFresh Development Preview 3 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

We just finished Preview 3 of AppFresh that hopefully solves most of the important issues of previous versions. We also tried to add the most requested features including the possibilty of manually marking applications as up to date to overwrite wrong version detection. The requested feature of linking applications was not fully implemented, but you can now add single applications to the exlude list.

Please note that some keyboard shortcuts and the toolbar main actions Check and Update have changed. Using AppFresh should be more intuitive now. When first starting AppFresh Preview 3, the cache will be cleared!

Complete list of changes:

• Check and update actions are more intuitive
• Fixed and improved application download and extraction
• Fixed misplaced ad banners from webpages (GraphicsConverter bug)
• Fixed .pkg/.mpkg handling
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed broken context menu keyboard shortcuts
• Improved version detection
• Improved progress sheet descriptions when downloading
• Added menu item to manually mark applications as up to date
• Added menu item to exclude applications
• Added new keyboard shortcuts
• Added AppFresh user agent string for all downloads

Posted in AppFresh | 35 Comments »

If you think you have installed a lot of applications on your machine check out the screenshot found in a japanese blog of an AppFresh user. We do not understand what he thinks about it, but more than 500 installed applications including 41 preference panes is sure more than we had ever expected. If you have installed even more, please send in some screenshots!

I get a little scared if I think what this screenshot will look like as soon as application extensions, plugins and widgets are supported, but i really want to know. We hope to get this done by the end of the week along with other improvements to version detection to get the number of unkown state applications down.

Macの手書き説明書

Posted in AppFresh | 14 Comments »

→ AppFresh Development Preview 2.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

We just finished a new bugfix release to Development Preview 2 that resolves some issues related to overall stability and includes some minor improvements. Please keep up sending in crash reports to help AppFresh get stable.

As I mentioned yesterday I want to post some hints on using AppFresh and maybe tune it a bit to get better results out of it.

1. First of all, and certainly most important, use the preferences to change defaults to your personal settings. Specifying include and exclude paths might lead to a significant scanning speed improvement. If you do not want AppFresh to scan for Apple updates disable it to save some time as well, since this is a very time consuming task.
2. You can add an applications parent path, for example Mail Scripts/*, to your exclude list by using the context menu item Add Parent Folder to Exclude List. This is much straighter and excludes all applications in that directory at once.
3. For some applications you might need to set a different name for an app with that it is registered with at iusethis.com. So for example the iusethis.com name of Disctop needs to be set to Disctop Pro. You might need to check the name by searching for it at iusethis.com yourself and set it using the context menu item Change iusethis.com name of Application. We will add an online database that AppFresh can use to track this automatically as soon one user adds an entry.
4. Double click (or use right / left arrow) on an entry in the application list to show some details. This is no standard functionality so you might need to get used to it. You can also show details by using the context menu item Show Details.
5. Use context menu Skip when Checking for Updates to ignore an application when checking and updating. This might be improved in future versions. Ideas highly appreciated.

I think tuning and setting the iusethis.com name of an application will help you find more updates and reduce applications in state Unknown. For some applications there is no version information set on iusethis.com so AppFresh will not detect new versions and set it to state Unknown (for example VMWare Fusion, Vidalia, Think, …). You can only try to get the maintainers to correctly set version informations.

Posted in AppFresh | 30 Comments »