A little overshadowed in the developer community by WWDC and all the inevitable ramblings that take place after, the famous Sparkle framework for automatically updating applications has seen an impressive update.

Still in beta, v1.5 introduces several new features including:

• Support for .pkg files
• Support for receiving demographic information from users
• Can update bundles, not restricted to just .app applications
• Minimum system version checking for users
• Garbage Collection
• Better version comparison algorithm
• DSA instead of less secure MD5
• Won’t update if app is running from a disk image

Andy has also taken the time to dramatically simplify the Sparkle site itself, and move the project over to Launchpad for easier development. Be sure to check out this new version to incorporate into your apps to gain the new features.

Sparkle Page

Sparkle on LaunchPad