News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 28, 2007

software

Applications, update thyselves

Posted Mar. 28, ’07, 8:09 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Software

AppFreshWe all know how important it is to keep your applications up to date. OS X’s software update does a good job of managing your built-in Apple apps, but what about the myriad of other applications that you have on your computer? A Spotlight search shows me that I have 86 programs installed on my computer. I can’t be expected to go to each of their websites every day to see if they’ve been updated.

Automatic update functionality, whether developed in house or using the Sparkle framework, can go a long way towards alleviating the dreaded out-dated application travesty. For the rest, though, you might want to consider AppFresh.

You could almost say that AppFresh is the Software Update for the rest of us. While the application is still in an early preview release, it seems to be largely functional. It’ll scan through your apps, and tell you whether or not they’re up-to-date, as well as give you the option to download newer versions. At the moment, AppFresh won’t install apps for you, but will rather download the updates to your desktop and let you apply them at your leisure.

AppFresh also includes a bunch of other useful functionality: like the ability to create “snapshots” of apps at particular points, allowing you to rollback to earlier versions if you want. You can also instruct AppFresh to skip certain applications in the update process. While Widgets are not checked in this version, this feature appears to planned for a future release. Naturally, AppFresh can also check for updates to itself (phew—that would have been embarrassing).

All in all, it’s a promising prospect for a function that I think most Mac users would be glad to see.

[via Digg]


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