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Appcaster + OpenFeedback
The Appcaster open source project is actually two projects working together.
- Appcaster is a PHP management console for indie Mac developers. It's a complete solution for selling your Mac applications on your website. It manages your product's revision history, generates Appcast feeds for Sparkle, stores your downloads in Amazon S3, processes orders via PayPal, and generates license files for your users using the AquaticPrime framework. If your application uses SparklePlus, Appcaster can track and chart your users' demographics, too.
- OpenFeedback is a Cocoa framework which allows your users to submit bug reports, feature requests, and ask support questions from directly within your application. It can store feedback in Appcaster or connect to your own custom server-side script. And, like Sparkle, OpenFeedback can be integrated into your application in just a few minutes - no code required.
More about Appcaster
As described in this blog post, shortly after I released VirtualHostX I realized I needed an easy way to manage orders and create Sparkle appcast feeds - Appcaster was my solution. Initially built over a weekend, I've continued to improve and expand it's capabilities during the last year. I'm releasing it as an open source project so other small-time Mac developers might benefit from it.
Feature Overview
- Requires PHP5 and MySQL 4
- Can manage multiple products
- Tracks releases for each product and generates the appropriate Appcast feed.
- Appcast feeds support md5 hashes to verify your file's integrity.
- Stores product downloads in Amazon S3 for reliability. Think that's overkill? Read this.
- Processes orders via PayPal's IPN system.
- Generates license files using AquaticPrime.
- Sends licenses to users in a template-based email.
- View order history / details.
- Re-send license files to users with one click.
- Manually create orders.
- Collects SparklePlus demographics and graphs them using the Google Charts API.
- Collects user feedback submitted via OpenFeedback.
- Most data is available as an RSS feed.
- Built using the Simple PHP Framework.
More about OpenFeedback
The idea for OpenFeedback came after seeing Cultured Code's clever solution in their task management application - Things. I thought their implementation was a terrific idea and asked if I could recreate it as a Cocoa framework for other developers to use. They very kindly said yes and - voilà! - OpenFeedback was born.
Feature Overview
- Cocoa framework written in Objective-C
- Easy to integrate into your app - no code required.
- Collects support questions, bug reports, and feature requests.
- Can submit data to any web server via a simple POST request.
So...
While I'm calling this a 1.0 release, Appcaster (and particularly OpenFeedback) are still very much beta in spirit. I've been using Appcaster for almost a year without any issues, and OpenFeedback has been rolled into the latest release of my own Mac software - so I consider them stable. Still, suggestions, bugs, and code contributions are very much welcome. Please don't hesitate to file issues in our bug tracker.
