14 DAY TRIAL // Downloading a myriad of applications a day should result in a lot of time spent with updating each software to its latest release. It would be nice if they all had been equipped with automatic updates feature, but you can't have it all. Currently there are 76 applications installed on my computer...Sorry, 77 (just finished installing another one) and 34 of them are not in their latest version.
You can imagine the trouble with going to each of their web page and see if there is any update for me. But 77 applications is not too big of a number as there are users that have over 200 softwares installed at all times. Now think of them getting the updates. Do they have a life anymore?
Fast solutions for the issue at hand have just started to appear on the web and all those I checked out are freebies. The principle is simple: it checks out the versions of the softwares you have installed on your computer and compares them with what other users of the applications have installed. When it picks up a later version than yours it'll raise the flag in some way to let you know of the availability of the update.
AppGet is a nifty little tool that does exactly that. It is a freebie and can be of great use if you want to stay up to date with the latest versions of softwares on the market. The interface is straight to the point and there aren't too many complications. Actually there is absolutely nothing complicated about it at all. Just run the 642KB installer and the application will do the rest.
Everything is done automatically and the synchronization with the server is swift and almost errorless. The principle is quite ingenious. Instead of beating the ways of the Internet for the latest version of every God forsaken application, all AppGet users are part of a network communicating via a server. Each time a user installs the latest version of a program the information is appended to the server database and distributed to all the users with that program installed. The greater the community the more accurate and faster are the version updates notification.
There is only one flaw in this "architecture": beta testers also install AppGet and send information on the versions of software they have installed. Now that is why for Winamp AppGet may show a version like 8.x.x or for Maxthon version 3.0.0.0, I think and really hope so.
Application window is to the point in the sense that it displays from the start the list of software detected on your system. It is split into three categories, according to the status of the version. First come the programs that are a bit behind with their versions. These are displayed in red for drawing attention. The great thing is that you can see at a glance how far behind you are with the update of an application as these are displayed in columns.
If you look carefully you will definitely notice that some softwares have the new version in bold characters. They are marked this way because there is a direct download link available in the right hand side panel of the application window. Additional information in this panel informs you on the name of the selected app, installed version number, latest version available, a Google search for the program and the time and date for the latest synchronization process.
Scrolling down past the red alert softwares you will get to the applications that are up to date and do not require attention.
At the bottom of the page there are the programs that could not be verified for version. The interesting thing is that a notorious program like Yahoo! Messenger was on the grey list. Now I can't imagine that there is no version number appended by the developer. Other softwares like Ulead GIF Animator and Ashampoo Office 2006 are also in the list and this comes as a serious downside of the application's recognition algorithm that has just been improved.
All in all it seems that the application performs quite OK with some exceptions. During our testing it detected version 8.x.x of Winamp and version 3.0.0 of Maxthon as being the latest. Regardless if the versions are valid or not, they are not open for public and many users may discard AppGet for showing different issues than there are on the official website of the respective application.
Creating an account on AppGet's website allows you to see how many softwares you have submitted the download links and view a list with all the applications installed on your computer. You can make the list private or show it to everybody in the community.
The settings of the application allow you to configure it to start with Windows, close it to system tray, automatically perform a synchronization once a day (more frequent synchronization has to be done manually) and insert your AppGet account details. If your Internet connection is under a proxy then you should provide all the details for connecting to the entire community.
The Good
AppGet is an easy way to see all the updates available for the softwares installed on your computer. There are no complicated settings and for some of the programs you get a direct download link for the latest release.
The Bad
Yahoo! Messenger was on the greyed out list of softwares, the one including all the apps it cannot detect a version for. The same was with Ashampoo Office 2006, WindowBlinds and Ulead GIF Animator and a bunch of other programs.
Some softwares had some incredible version numbers: the latest Winamp's is 8.x.x, Maxthon already reached version 3.0.0, Firefox's most recent issue is 2.0 (although it displayed that the version installed on the machine was 2.0.0.6), Thunderbird seems to have released version 3.0a1 on Windows (this version is available for MAC and Linux platforms).
The Truth
The conclusion is that AppGet works just fine if none of its users has any beta or alpha releases installed and if the applications you use are designed only for Windows.
It seems that most of the problems are with important softwares, as I checked the tiny ones and the issue displayed by AppGet was valid.
However, there is still work to be done in order to bring the program to a reliable state where only a minimum of errors is available when displaying the updates.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
