Why WinSparkle?

vslavik — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:53:16 GMT

Why was WinSparkle born? Simply put, I grew tired of waiting for a good updates-checking library for Windows. I use Andy's Sparkle framework in Mac version of Poedit for years now, but the Windows version didn't have equivalent functionality until now. And I need it, the problem with users running an old version and reporting bugs in it is a real one.

Unfortunately, none of the existing solutions met my requirements:

Permissive Open Source. This is a must, and not only for OSS like Poedit -- I had only bad experience with third party binary-only closed source libraries.
Polite. Must ask the user for permission and fully disclose what it does.
User friendly. The UI must be nice and usable. Just telling the user there's an update (as many home-grown checkers do) is not enough, it should provide additional information and make it easy to install updates, too.
Must not require admin privileges. And no constantly running background service either. (Hello, Google!)
Can't have extra dependencies and should be usable from any language. Native C++ apps, C#, Python, you name it. There are some .NET updaters out there, but they're of no help if your app is a native one.
Must be self-container and in-app. No extra apps that the user would have to install and use.

In short, I needed Sparkle for Windows. So, here it is.

WinSparkle - Blog

Why WinSparkle?