[Sparkle] App usage sparklines using Sparkle queries

[Chuck Houpt]

Hi All,

Apologies if this is too far off-topic for the list, but I thought it 
might be interesting to developer-users.

One of the nice thing about Sparkle is that appcast pings give the 
developer feedback on how often an app is actually used. Many 
software sites display download counts, but downloads don't 
necessarily translate into regular use.

I recently added Sparkle to one of my freeware apps. Rather then 
display a download count, I decided to display a mini-graph (a 
sparkline) of daily usage for the last 100 days:

http://habilis.net/validator-sac/

Looking at the sparkline, one can immediately see a bump up in usage 
over the last week due to a release that fixed a festering Leopard 
bug. I hope graphic will help users judge the utility of the app, 
rather than just raw download-popularity.

I made the graph with the Sparkline PHP libary, and a shell script to 
extract the Sparkle ping data. More background info on sparklines can 
be found at Infosthetics.

http://sparkline.org/
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/09/sparklines.html

Cheers - Chuck
http://chuck.habilis.net
mailto:chuck at habilis.net