AppFresh - Helps keeps programs up to date
Oct 16, '07 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 7 out of 10]
[This is the Pick of the Week for the week of October 15th]
It's not often I write about pre-beta software, but AppFresh was so useful to me, I felt it worthy of a PotW selection. AppFresh is a program to help you keep your other applications up to date. Both VersionTracker and MacUpdate have similar apps, though you'll need to register with MacUpdate for their app to work, and VersionTracker's requires a paid subscription. AppFresh, on the other hand, just works out of the box. It uses data from osx.iusethis.com, as well as being ablt to see some applications' built-in updaters to check for updates.
Before we go any further, the biggest downside to AppFresh right now is that it won't work for all your apps. I've got about 900 apps installed on the Mac Pro (I test a lot of stuff), and AppFresh only sees about 500 of those. MacUpdate lists all of my apps, but it won't update all of them (as not all are in its database). For the 500 AppFresh does see, however, it works quite well. AppFresh also checks for updates to widgets, preference panels, and even Apple's own software. You'll have to use its preferences to add in non-standard application locations -- I keep most of my apps on another hard drive, and it didn't see them until I did this.
When you run the app for the first time, it scans for programs, and then lists them in categories: All, Updates, Up to Date, and Unknown. It also sorts your programs by type: Applications, Plugins, Widgets, and Preference Panes. In any of those areas, you can choose one or more programs and then download updates. Updates are available in two ways: there are certain apps that can be automatically downloaded via a progress dialog, and others that you have to do some manual work to get. When I first ran the program, it showed 125 apps that needed updating, and 85 of those had the automatic updates available. Since I'm a chicken about anything automatic, I set AppFresh's preferences to download, but not install, these updates. It then set to work, and some time later, I had a folder with 85 subfolders, each containing an update to one of the apps.
The manual updates use an in-app simple browser to display the web page for each app that needs an update. When you click the app's download link, the web page vanishes and AppFresh's own progress dialog takes over. You can also mark a given app as the most current version, so the program won't list an update that you don't need. I did this with Audacity, for example, because AppFresh saw version 1.2.6, but version 1.2.5 is the latest version for Intel Macs.
The other promising feature in AppFresh is snapshots. For any app, you can create multiple snapshots that let you easily revert to an older version of the program. So if you're not really sure that the changes in an app are going to be worth having, just make a snapshot of the current version before you upgrade. If you don't like the new version, you can then roll back to the prior version with a couple clicks. At this point, though, I couldn't get the feature working: while I could create snapshots, I wasn't able to restore them, nor delete them from the list. I'm also not sure how well this might work with large, complex apps that have parts in many places. But it's something I'll be keeping an eye on, as it could be very useful.
There are other issues that you might expect with a not-yet-even-beta app -- it downloaded the wrong app for me a couple times, based on similar names (a good reason not to use the auto-install option). I also had to trash the prefs once to make downloads start working again. If you plan on testing this, just remember it's not done yet, so you may have similar issues. Still, I find AppFresh intriguing and plan to keep an eye on its progress.
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