andymatuschak.org: Sparklings

This article was published on Monday, January 09th, 2006 at 3:06 pm.

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Introducing Sparkle: Easy Self-Updates for All!

See It in Action!

For a good real-world test, I integrated Sparkle into Pixen. It took less than ten minutes. Here’s what it looked like once it was up and running (and once I put a fake update on the server):


(h.264; 480 kb; requires Quicktime 7)

The Features

  • True self-updating—no action required from the user.
  • Supports appcasts for release information. Appcasts are cool.
  • Extracts updates from .tar, .tbz, and .tgz archives.
  • Displays a detailed status window to the user.
  • Can display release notes to the user before updating.
  • Seamless app integration—there’s no mention of Sparkle anywhere; your app’s name and icon are inserted everywhere automatically.
  • Really, really easy to install: five simple steps.
  • You don’t have to put any glue code for Sparkle anywhere in your project (it’s all through IB), so it’s trivial to upgrade or remove the module.
  • (Should be) good about error handling in bad conditions.
  • Open-source (of course), under the MIT license.

Why?

One day, I was sitting around using TextMate and noticed that it suddenly had a self-update system. I looked at the blog and saw that it was using Quicksilver’s code. So I thought: hm. Time to make a solution everyone can use!

Most software update functionality is really lame. Something pops up, says, “There’s a new version available!” and sends the user off to the web site to handle the rest himself. Some of them will download the .dmg for you, but you’ve still gotta go find where it put it and install it yourself. Hardly “slick”. More importantly, it’s not Mac-ish to do things that way. Everything should be easy and automatic.

Conclusion

So I really hope that Sparkle will solve this problem. In fact, if you find it useful, it would be really great if you’d tell a developer friend of yours to use it, too. It would be fantastic if all Mac software soon had automated updates.

Of course, Sparkle is open source. If you’ve found something wrong in the code or have made some useful modifications, please let me know!

Got Thoughts?

By all means share them, and start the conversation.

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