Sparkle (software)

Sparkle

Sparkle's Test App showing a Software Update window.
Original author(s) Andy Matuschak
Developer(s) Sparkle Project (2014–present)
Initial release January 9, 2006
Stable release 1.8.0 / July 26, 2014
Development status Active
Written in Objective-C
Operating system OS X
Available in Multi-lingual
Type Software update framework
License MIT License
Website sparkle-project.org

Sparkle is an open source software framework for OS X designed to simplify updating software for the end user of a program. Sparkle's primary means of distributing updates is through "appcasting," a term coined for the practice of using an RSS enclosure to distribute updates and release notes.

At the end of 2013, development of Sparkle was ended by the original author, then later picked up by the newly formed Sparkle Project open source group on GitHub in June 2014 as the official continuation of the project.[1]

Programs

It is used in over 100 programs, such as:

Other OS alternatives

There are several open source Windows alternatives to offer similar functionality to Sparkle:

There is also a REALbasic implementation of Sparkle that works on OS X, Windows and Linux: RBSparkle.

References

  1. Matuschak, Andy. "Sparkle development's moving to a Github org of volunteers.". twitter.com. Twitter. Retrieved 2014-06-29.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sparkle.