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

We’ve been using the last days to work on a new version of AppFresh including lots of bugfixes and some improvements to functionality. With the new version AppFresh is much more robust with reading Info.plist files and should stop crashing when scanning installed applications. Thank you for the help to track this down. We also disabled the included InputManager, that is used to make AppFresh the default Software Update application as well as extending the Software Update preference pane. Unfortunately there is a incompatibility with other Input Mangers (at least Saft). You do not need to do anything, it will be removed on next start and Saft will hopefully continue to work as you expect it to.

Complete list of changes:

• Fixed crash when scanning applications with invalid Info.plist
• Fixed downloading of updates
• Downloading of updates is much more comfortable now with some new functions and dialog fixes
• Disabled and removed InputManager due to incompatibilities with Saft (will be enabled when fixed)
• CrashReporter added (please help us by using it)
• New menu action for revealing files in Finder
• New menu action to reset and clean scanned data
• Scanning of existing Snapshots fixed
• Sparkle version comparison fixed
• Improved version recognition
• Improved enabling/disabling of toolbar/menu items
• Progress sheet fixes
• Fixed updating of group by category count numbers
• Fixed getting the right name of some apps

One important thing to know: Some available updates are not detected correctly from the users point of view. For exampple Growl seems to be broken, but in fact its not. There are two problems with Growl. First: there are two different versions defined within the package (localized 0.7.5 and not localized 0.7.6)…thats fixed. Second: the version information set on iusethis.com appcast defines 0.76. The missing dot breaks version detection.

I’ll try to post some basic guide on using AppFresh as soon as possible. Please check out the preferences and context menus when using. You can sure tune a little bit and improve results.

Posted in AppFresh | 14 Comments »

There’s one more thing… I’ve been working together with Thomas Winkler and Maik Szmatulewicz on another Mac application called AppFresh which keeps all applications on your Mac up to date by checking the internet for new releases and makes downloading and installing them a breeze.

Today, we release a first development preview to hear what you think about it. It certainly won’t work for all of your applications yet (listing their state as unknown) and some edges may still be rough, but all in all it works quite well. Since the application has received no public testing yet it won’t download updates and overwrite your old applications but instead extract downloaded files to your desktop, so you can inspect the contents of the downloaded archives and manually drag applications to your Applications folder. This will of course get more comfortable with time.

Currently, we get the information on available updates from the application’s appcast feed (if it has one, that’s great) and additionally check the cool osx.iusethis.com which provides appcasts as well. For application-provided appcasts, we really like what Andy Matuschak has created with Sparkle, since Sparkle-compliant appcasts are our most reliable source of information by far.

You’re welcome to test the application and we’d be really happy to hear your feedback. Please comment on this post or send an email to appfresh@metaquark.de. Thanks!

Edit: Everyone who’s got problems with the stuck panel, please re-download the application.

Posted in AppFresh | 17 Comments »