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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I‘m weird, but for some reason seeing a Sparkle „Update available“ modal popping up fils me with joy (The software I‘m using is getting better) and I enjoy reading the changelog. If there’s some weird custom updater in another software it always fills me with dread because I have to navigate a different UI, and probably have to restart it immediately.

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The modal popup is the single thing I can’t stand about sparkle updates. Why oh why can’t they use the regular notification system and respect DND. It always seems so random as well, it’s not when the application starts or quits, just some rando timer polling for updates to surprise me with an interruption I can’t ignore

Nothing worse than starting iTerm and typing half a command when suddenly this thing interrupts you.

Modern versions of Sparkle are a less random in when to show the update alert (lots of software, iTerm including, use ancient versions of Sparkle)

DND is not properly/reliably detectable for 3rd parties. Support for Notification Center is not well designed for a framework to control and works as an auxiliary/supplemental (not primary) functionality for 3rd parties, so apps themselves would have to opt into using it along with adding a lightweight UI indicator which may need to be tailored to the app in question.

Further support is available for apps to support more gentle reminders -- https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/gentle-reminders/ which is a mechanism that iTerm developer wanted but developer has other priorities.

Users can opt into automatically downloading/installing updates too which may minimize prompts

I don't think that's weird, I enjoy those as well. So much so that I have a newsletter where I post changelogs of various apps that had updates in the past week (https://buttondown.email/appsandupdates). Adding apps is a slow process but I'm starting to see quite a bit of repeated apps so I'll have to speed it up.

Is anyone really interested in reading the detailed changelog for apps they don't use?

In practice it's more of a software discovery email, with the added bonus of knowing that they are being worked on actively, and finding out what sort of things they are working on at the same time. It's not really about "bug fixes and improvements" and I trim those out if I have time.

In the latest newsletter „Clean my Mac X“ is listed. I always assumed that this is some form of malware, because they advertise so aggressively. Does it really make sense to „clean“ your mac?

It cleans it in terms of identifying large files, duplicate files/images, shows you caches for apps, uninstaller, which apps and files are old and never/rarely used. And so on. It's more of a convenience tool than anything. Don't recall other features.

I think there is a certain type of company that go for fairly generic(named) software with a lot of SEO and marketing to be able to earn a lot of money. I guess there is a venn diagram of malware creators where this applies too but I don't think they are.

They are also the developers behind SetApp. I mean, that's a pretty mainstream/famous app(store?) so they collaborate directly with loads of developers/companies to distribute their apps in SetApp. If that counts for something.

Agreed, their marketing can really sketch one out but CleanMyMac X is tremendously useful. I use almost every function it has once it a while. The app updater for example, it not only updates Sparkle apps but also lists outdated Mac App Store apps. The MAS itself fails to list those updates for some reason most of the time in its "Updates" pane.

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