An Experiment in Bloggery

Recently I got an email from Ricardo Batista, the owner of MacShareware.net. He had a pre-release version of a new SDK for doing automatic updates on software sites. The only site to support this so far is MacShareware.net, but there’s hope that MacUpdate and VersionTracker will adopt this new format. Basically, it consists of a plist file with a specific set of keys and values, and these values are used for updating programs. The software site scans all known MacPAD files every few hours, and when it detects a change it updates its listing for that program. That way, you change the MacPAD file and in a few hours, the software sites have your update automatically. No more visiting each site and updating the listing there.

The other goal of the MacPAD file format is to give developers an easy way of adding version checking to their program. They can simply download the file and compare versions to see if there’s a new version. To this end, a PHP script was included that does the check, along with a snippet of C code that calls this script via the ‘php’ command-line process. Of course, this is a pretty ugly way to do this, but Ricardo just didn’t have the time yet to write up proper C code, and he already had the PHP. To this end, I have written REALbasic code to do the checking natively, and it works quite well. I sent the code to Ricardo (he knew I was writing it, as I offered to do so when he sent me the SDK). I sent the RB code to him and hopefully it will show up in the official release of the SDK tomorrow.

Perhaps next I should write some Cocoa code that does the same thing?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2003 at 7:27 am and is filed under Mac OS X, Programming, REALbasic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.