Keep your Mac updated with AppFresh

If you like to keep an arsenal of software on your Mac, you know how tedious it is to keep your apps up-to-date. AppFresh 0.4 promises to simplify this process:

AppFresh is an utility that keeps all applications on your Mac up to date by checking the internet for new releases and makes downloading and installing them a breeze.

Here are my first thoughts:

What I like

Unlike Apple’s Software Update utility, AppFresh checks your for updates from third-party developers as well as Apple.

If you’ve used Mail.app or iTunes, the interface should be quite familiar and intuitive. In the left column are groups organized by update status and application status. To right, are your applications. A handy preview pane in the lower-left shows release notes for each app, helping you decide to update now or skip a version.

AppFresh sports shine and gradients, but doesn’t overdo it like other apps.

Best of all, AppFresh is free. Since it’s a beta, this might change in the final release. But it still beats the gouging $40/year for MacUpdate Desktop and $50/year for VersionTracker Pro.

What I don’t like

For “safety reasons,” AppFresh won’t automatically launch and run installers, so you’ll still have to manually install software updates on your own. The programmers could have allayed security concerns by simply prompting for your system password before installation, but they chose not to go this route. Or perhaps, they’re planning this for the final release.

While the user interface is familiar and easy-to-use, its use of screen real estate could be more efficient. Each listing shows a large icon and two lines of text. On my MacBook Pro, that’s only about 18 rows visible at once.

Giant icons and white space are pretty, but I’d rather see more information than superfluous eye candy.

My final word

For a every early beta, AppFresh is smooth, stable, and easy-to-use. The final release will need automatic installations, a few interface tweaks, and keep a reasonable price tag for it to truly squash the competition.