Jumping Ship

Time for another installment of App of the Week! The app for this week I actually just found last night, so I haven’t had a great deal of time to test all of its functionality, but from what I’ve seen, it looks quite promising.

AppFresh functions for third-party applications much in the same way that Software Update works for Apple products. When you launch it, it performs an inventory of all of your installed programs, plugins, and even widgets, attempting to match them with the iusethis database to search for updates. The result is quite effective, positively identifying more than 75% of all of my applications and providing accurate information about their version status. The remaining 25% of those applications were not actually apps at all, but rather other items that resided in the apps folder, such as documentation and uninstall prompts, which naturally did not have update options.

So why use this program? While it’s true that a great deal of apps have their own update client built in, many of them aren’t activated unless you prompt them to, or at best remind you of a new version. AppFresh does a comprehensive check of all your apps at the same time, allowing you to pick and choose which updates you want to perform, referring you to the appropriate website for the download. In addition, you have the option of backing up the currently saved versions of your apps, should an update go awry. Though AppFresh is still in beta, it has all of the polish and the functionality of not only a near-finished product, but also one that every mac user should have in their Applications folder.