[Sparkle] App usage sparklines using Sparkle queries

[Andy Matuschak]

Very cool! And with the profiling stuff in Sparkle 1.5, you can plot  
OS / CPU / model trends and stuff like that. Good work, Chuck.

- Andy Matuschak

On Feb 26, 2008, at 8:12 AM, Chuck Houpt wrote:

> 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
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