With the introduction of the Mac App Store, Mac applications are starting to follow iOS’s updating process which involves visiting the Update tab, optionally reading about what’s changed, and updating your applications from a central hub. We’re accustomed to this on iOS — it makes sense where control over each mobile application has been centralized from the very beginning and where you’re likely to have a greater abundance of small apps to update. The transition from third party software suites to the Mac App Store, however, has caused a bit of a clash between applications and how they update themselves. Coming from a world where Sparkle informs us of updates when we launch applications, we’re accustomed to seeing pop-ups informing us of new updates for our few Mac apps as we need them. I myself prefer this type of notification on the desktop.
There are problems with both methods. Sparkle’s update pop-up forces you to stop what you’re doing to deal with the update notification, and currently the Mac App Store doesn’t notify you of updates unless you manually check the store. With these two problems in mind, Lennart Ziburski designed a concept that freshly implements ideas already familiar to us from apps like Safari and Spotlight on Lion.
