AppFresh keeps all your applications fresh on your computer with automatic software updates.

These days all the major operating systems take care of keeping them up to date with updates and patches without much human intervention or with minimal human intervention.

Whereas, when it comes to third party software updates you have to be on top of it and many of the softwares can only inform you about an available update when you actually use the software.

If you use a Mac then you are blessed with a cute little free application, AppFresh, that keeps track of all your software updates in one place. AppFresh scans your computer to find out about all the softwares that you have installed on your computer and tells you if those softwares are up-to-date or not. If there is a software update available then it will list it out along with an option to update the software without you launching the software yourself to update to the latest version.

It is, in fact, very straight-forward to use AppFresh. Just download and launch AppFresh.

You’ll be greeted with a authorization dialog asking you to grant AppFresh permission to automatically update the softwares that it considers safe. It moves the old versions to Trash so in case if you need to recover you have a way to get it back. Also, it would be a good idea to have a clean backup of your system available somewhere in case something goes wrong. Click on the Next button.

You’ll be presented with an IUseThis Integration dialog. IUseThis is an online service that allows you to have a backup of the list of applications on your computer with the version information. This would be particularly handy if/when you have to re-image your computer and you don’t know what different softwares that you had before it went bad. With IUseThis you can retrieve the list of applications installed on your computer and if/when integrated with AppFresh you can just run AppFresh to install the latest version of all the softwares that you had on your computer.

Choose a username and password to create an account with IUseThis.com. Check the “Add AppFresh to my profile” checkbox to integrate AppFresh with IUseThis. Keep in mind that integrating IUseThis is an optional step and so if you prefer not to integrate then don’t enter a username and password and click on the “Finish” button.

AppFresh will now scan for all the installed software on your computer.

Once it finishes scanning you should be able to see AppFresh main window where it lists all the applications installed on your computer along with a status description of if an update is available or not.

As you can see on the left sidebar you can narrow down on the updates by Applications, Plugins, Widgets, Preference Panes and System Updates or by vendors. This helps if you have quite a lot of applications installed so you can narrow down easily.

If you look at the middle pane you should be able to see the list of applications and there are 3 buttons on top which you can use to check for updates, update all applications, delete an app update.

Once you select an application on the middle pane you should be able to see more information about the app on the right sidebar which includes the latest release information which is pretty handy.

If you choose an application and right click (Control click) the context menu pops up and provides choices to exclude an app from showing up on the list, skip an update and of course a choice to install the selected update.

Once you choose to update an application AppFresh will do its best to locate and install the update without you doing much. But in cases where it can’t locate a proper update it will pop open a window for you to choose the link where it can get the update. It’s very simple and straight-forward.

Once you click on the appropriate link AppFresh will take care of the rest to install the update.

When the updates finish you should be able to see what applications got updated along with the version numbers and a status message of how the update go.

Overall AppFresh is a wonderfully crafted applications that blends very nicely with the Mac look-and-feel along with performing the job quite consistently. Surely AppFresh can keep all your Mac applications up to date.

Give it a try and I’m sure you’ll like it. Download AppFresh.

Do you know of any equivalent app for Windows? I would certainly love to get my hands on a similar app for Windows! Please let us know.

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Mac, Mac OSX, AppFresh, Mac Software Update