What is Appdate?
Software applications are spreading out quickly, these times. Anyone who lives in the software business or depends upon it, then may have a problem: how can I be sure I'm be using the latest - and, presumibly, more secure and advanced version?
Giving the huge demand for new features and bug fixing - not to count the security problem that may arise from time to time - software applications are promptly updated, (sometime) even on a daily basis.
We offer an information "hub" where all those changes are tracked. We surf the web for you, targetting an always growing set of application web sites, and building a simple list.
This list is then served as an RSS feed, for you to add it to your preferred RSS feed reader.
How much does it cost?
As far as Appdate remains in the beta stage, everyone will be able to use the site at full potential. Soon or later, some ads may be added to the site and/or to the feeds.
We are also planning to set up an annual subscription fee for "pro" accounts, where more feature (and no ads) will be served.
How it works?
The site itself is only the frontend for Appdate. But in the background, lot of smart bots regularly traverse every tracked project's site and see if an update has been released.
At the time of writing, there's no other way than to, literally, scrape those web pages and search some regular patterns inside them. For this to happen in a sufficiently reliable way, a bot has to be written for each site/project.
For the geekiest of you, those scripts are in Python and the site is powered by the Zend Framework.
This work is very time consuming and a little frustrating. We all hope that this approach may scale :)
Why don't you track ...?
Well, there are hundreds of interesting projects out there but, as stated before, the process of adding a project is not as "plug'n'play" as you may think. We are, for now, focusing on the projects we use (it's a start, don't you think?).
May you need a project tracked, don't hesitate and use the feedback form to let us know.
The Appdate team