In an effort to keep the iusethis database even more up to date, we are now also updating new releases from RSS appcasts, as well as generating them. That means that if you use Sparkle to update your app, you can also automatically update iusethis at the same.
Application Developers: In order to enable this, just go to the edit app dialog and add a link to your appcast. Iusethis automatically will start checking your rss feed on a regular basis. If you provide a sparkle::releaseNotesLink, we will get the changes from that, otherwise we will use the rss description from the appcast feed.
Are you an app developer, and haven't checked ut Sparkle yet? It's a snap to implement, and there are several ways to easily generate the appcasts. For instance, you can use the PHP RSS Appcast Generator, or you can use SparkleCaster. If you prefer, automatically generates appcasts for all the apps, at http://osx.iusethis.com/appcast/<appname> (My favorite way of doing it ;)
Wonderful!
But, how are you going to extract changes from the release notes URL exactly?
I’m using a valid xhtml page as release notes, with full changelog for all releases. Will it be inserted altogether as “changes”? ;)
What about parsing the response and extracting content in a smart way (e.g. element with a given id/classname)?. Please advice!
Claudio
The app cast isn’t grabbing the ‘short’ version number. I may be doing something wrong, but my app cast has both the build number and the short number. As far as I understand the short number is the one that should be displayed while the build number is used for the actual version checking. If this is not the case could somebody tell me what I’m doing wrong? My appcast is at northisup.net/appcast/TvTaggr.xml, and my app has the following for its version info:
CFBundleShortVersionString 0.9 CFBundleVersion 100