I want my applications to Sparkle

For those not in the know, Sparkle is a software module that gives software developers an easy, powerful way to add automatic update capability. Gone are the simple notifications that just tell you there was an update, forcing you to visit a web page, download, and manually install the update.

With this module, it can prompt the user, show release notes, download the update, install, and automatically relaunch. After the developer integrates this into their product, all they need do is set up an appcast feed. In other words, the developer sets up a custom RSS feed with the release notes for entries with the enclosure being the new version of the application.

A couple of my applications already leverage this hot new technology and it’s great. It’s the next best thing to Apple actually opening up Software Update to third parties. I’m not holding my breath for that though. I think we’ll see Sparkle in Adobe Photoshop before that.