[Sparkle] Appfresh abuse

[Rob Napier]

This was wise on his part. In a war between application (MacSpice) and
meta-applications (AppFresh), applications are going to win. Users aren't
going to not use an app because AppFresh doesn't update it, but they might
not use AppFresh if too many applications fight it in some kind of arms
race. That said, it also points to AppFresh's hesitancy to limit what apps
they update. Unless they have a large critical mass of supported apps,
there's no point to purchasing their product. If they had to get permission
for each app, they'd never build that critical mass.

This is a good lesson in the design of the centralized Sparkle updater that
has been discussed before. I'd love a central control panel for managing
Sparkle updates (like Apple Updater), rather than always having the check on
startup. But the impact on apps like MacSpice should be kept in mind. Of
course a centralized Sparkle updater would be almost by definition opt-in,
so it should be fine.

To your earlier interest in use statistics, the probable answer for that is
to post anonymous launch-count statistics with the Sparkle query. I believe
SparklePlus already offers this kind of thing. But then it sounds like your
problem may be addressed anyway.

-Rob

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Charles D. H. Williams <
developer at macspice.com> wrote:

> I am pleased to report that AppFresh's developer Jonathan Witt has now
> agreed to make future releases of AppFresh ignore MacSpice and not to fake
> its user-agent string in order to prevent website owners blocking it if they
> so choose.


-- 
Rob Napier -- Software and Security Consulting -- http://robnapier.net
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