sparkleology

Get Version

1.0.0

→ ‘sparkleology Skitch’

What

Takes a Mac OS X application name that uses Sparkle for auto-updates, and returns information about that application’s Sparkle RSS feed or the latest download URL for that Application.

Installing

sudo gem install sparkleology

The basics

The command-line app sparkleology has two modes of operation depending on the argument/STDIN provided. If the last argument, or STDIN, is:

That is, the result of sparkleology can be passed to itself.

Therefore, since sparkleology can take the argument as STDIN as well, you can pipe the results together:

sparkleology Skitch | sparkleology
sparkleology Skitch | xargs sparkleology

both return http://skitch.com/download/skitch-b6.2-v10678.zip

The reason that sparkleology returns the RSS feed URL if you give it an App Name is that this feed URL is permanently consistent, whereas the download URL possibly changes with each new application version. So, the feed URL could be stored and then used later (say on a machine that does not have the original app already installed) to fetch the latest version of the application, which may or may not be already installed.

We’re using this in the noober project script for installing a list of apps on a fresh OS X machine.

How to submit patches

Read the 8 steps for fixing other people’s code and for section 8b: Submit patch to Google Groups, use the Google Group above.

You can fetch the source from github:

http://github.com/drnic/sparkleology/tree/master

git clone git://github.com/drnic/sparkleology.git

Build and test instructions

cd sparkleology
rake test
rake install_gem

License

This code is free to use under the terms of the MIT license.

Contact

Comments are welcome. Send an email to Dr Nic Williams

Dr Nic Williams, 18th September 2008
Theme extended from Paul Battley