It’s still in Development Preview, but don’t let the status fool you - AppFresh by Metaquark is a very useful application. What does it do, you ask?

Think of AppFresh as a unified Software Update for all the third party applications you’ve installed. When you first launch AppFresh, you’ll get a window (see above) that lists all your current apps and their current version numbers. At a glance you can see whether the version you have is the most current or not. If your version of Skype, for example, is old, AppFresh lets you know that a newer version is available. Instead of having to launch each individual app, and run its own “Check for Update” menu, you can now, at a glance, see which versions are updated and which are not.

Another handy feature this program has is its ability to tell the user when a particular application was last used. It would be nice if it also included an Uninstall option for removing applications that aren’t being used anymore, but hey, this is the Development Preview version, so I’m going to cut the Metaquark crew some slack.

The best part of AppFresh (to me, anyway) is, upon your command, AppFresh will download and install the most recent version of the app and get rid of the older version of your app simultaneously. I’ve found this feature works as advertised 95% of the time, with the exception of applications that are delivered in the form of a package install. In that particular scenario, AppFresh will inform you that it has downloaded the installer into your Downloads folder for you to manually install.

There’s much more to this app than what I’ve briefly written, but I should add that AppFresh is a Mac OS X application only, and works under both Leopard and Tiger. It’s free (for now) so get it while you can. Highly Recommended

-Krishna

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 12:20 am and is filed under News, Plugs, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.