Pick of the Week: AppFresh

15Jul07

This week’s pick of the week is one of the most useful pieces of software I have come across in a long time. Updating apps can become a real drag, and I know that I ignore updates regularly just so I can start using my apps as soon as possible. Now of course Apple’s Software Update covers all of the stuff Apple do, like iTunes, QuickTime and Mac OS X updates, but what about the rest? Is there no way of automating the updating of all my third-party apps all at once? AppFresh has broken my bad habit and allows me to keep up to date on all my apps – Apple and 3rd-party – all with the greatest ease.

But, there is a problem… It’s not only just entering Alpha development, so I don’t recommend it for daily use yet, just because, however I haven’t had any issues or bugs with it so far after a few days of messing around with it. But please keep your eye on it and remember this shining letter of recommendation when you think “Wow, this software is reeeeally useful now that its out of beta!”. I’m just letting you know now before something screws up and you come back here to lynch me. =)

So this is what it looks like:

In the left-hand column you can see the which apps are up to date and which have updates waiting, as well as the different categories of software that AppFresh monitors, which include: Apple apps, third-party apps, application plug-ins, preference panes and widgets. The sidebar features badges such as those in Mail or iTunes so the interface becomes intuitive from the beginning.

In order to keep track of all of the different bits of software, AppFresh gets its information from iusethis.com, a site dedicated to keeping track of what software people are using on their Macs. This allows AppFresh to create a central repository of all the apps tracked by iusethis.com, meaning you can pick up an update as soon as the new update is posted to iusethis.com (which is pretty damn quick if I do say so).

But perhaps one of the best features of AppFresh is its built-in Snapshots feature. I can guarantee that this will happen to you once in your lifetime: you will be the receiving end of a fatal bug in someones app and you’ll be wishing and praying that you could simply roll-back the clock to the older version of that software, to before you had that little accident. Well, AppFresh can do that for you. You have to think of this as Time Machine for your apps. What AppFresh does is it creates a ’snapshot’ of the current version of any app (below I’ve done a screenshot of me doing a snapshot of iTunes 7.3 before updating to 7.3.1) that you can then roll-back to at any time from the comfort of AppFresh (you can even restore User and Global preferences if they go sour).

I’ve started doing this regularly with every app when I update, simply to cover my back in same way that a Back-up (which I hope you all do) covers your back. Before I update any app, I create a snapshot of the current version. I then keep that snapshot until I come to update to the next version, I then replace the old snapshot with a new version in preparation for the next update (did that make sense, it did in my head). This means I always have a proven version of each app to fall back on each time, just in case.

Any way, watch this space, I expect great things from AppFresh. So go give the developers, Maik Szmatulewicz, Thomas Winkler & Jonas Witt your support by downloading AppFresh and giving them feedback.

My overall score:

90%

Download AppFresh

Filed under: Apple, Pick of the Week, Software, Technology   |  Leave a Comment