Sparkle

Centralized Update Management

Asked by Tekl

Now, as Sparkle is very popular and most of my apps use it, it becomes very annoying with all those pop-ups.

Why not making a centralized update manager which all apps can register to. So I can update once a day and not when launching the apps. I want to work with the apps when I start them and the updates delay my work as I also want to be up to date.

Maybe you could just make a kind of download and install scheduler. So the app has an option to use the scheduler and when launching and a new update is available it will be send silently to the scheduler.

Sorry for my English

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Andy Matuschak (andymatuschak) said : 		#1

I was thinking about using a more centralized tech for a while, and I wrote out how I'd do it, but I actually heard a ton of complaining about that method. A lot of people don’t like how Growl does it: it’s in-your-face and sorta power-user-y. And it’s super-sketchy for an app to ask for your admin password on its second launch so it can install some external privileged component with a different name you haven’t heard of. It’s like something a Windows app would do.

What will I do about it instead? Probably nothing. I don’t think that any solution I can come up with will be good enough—Apple’s gotta do it. I hope they will eventually.

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Karl Moskowski (kolpanic-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#2

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but I built a utility that checks all installed Sparkle-enabled apps for updates and presents them in a list. You can launch each to perform the actual update. You can also schedule weekly or monthly update checks.

Pre-built binary and source (BSD-licensed) are available at:
<http://bitbucket.org/kolpanic/coruscation/>

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Tekl (sparkle-rumborak) said : 		#3

Hi Karl,

very interesting approach. Isn't it possible to implement the update function like in AppFresh or Macupdate Desktop? Starting every single app is frustrating and also 15 apps simultaneously.

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Karl Moskowski (kolpanic-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#4

I thought about that, but since I hack Sparkle a bit to make it work in this situation - in particular to allow checking for unsigned updates for apps with older versions of Sparkle - I figured it's best to allow the apps to update themselves. Besides, it's probably rare that you'll encounter more than a couple of available updates (except maybe the first time, and if you haven't run them in a while).

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