andymatuschak.org: Sparklings

I’m making good progress with Sparkle 2, but it occurs to me that since DSA signatures are going to be required, and branching is much more complicated, it’d be great to have an appcast making app that would create and update developers’ appcasts.

Here’s what I envision:

Storyboard

• User drops their .app onto SparkleCaster for the first time.
• SparkleCaster reads all the relevant info from the bundle and creates a profile for the app, asking the user for S/FTP access and so on.
• SparkleCaster generates DSA keys for the app (or takes the user’s if they want) and keeps track of them.
• SparkleCaster generates a differential binary patch.
• SparkleCaster collects any additional information it requires for the version like branch and release notes (the rest it scraped from the info.plist), makes the appcast, and uploads it.
• In the future, when new version of the .app are dropped onto SparkleCaster, it uses the old app profile and just collects the small amount of information about that version.

There would probably have to be some actual managing kind of interface, too, in addition to that simple process—especially if I allow developers to recall bad updates, which is really appealing.

The only problem with all this is that I’m not even a little bit going to have time to write it. School will be starting, and I’m also continuing my summer research, so even getting Sparkle 2 done will be tense.

So! Would anyone like to write this thing, working alongside me as I write Sparkle 2? It’s a big chance to get your name out there and to make a lot of developers happy.