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Re: [ANN] Shovel - Third-Party "Software Update"

At 15:38 Uhr -0500 24.03.2004, Kevin Ballard wrote:
Ok, I think this is the killing blow for your search algorithm. I just started a find on the entire disc for files named MacPAD.url and it found all MacPAD.url files in a fraction of the time it took for Shovel to scan my darwinports dports directory (and this includes having find scan my 120GB external HD in addition to my 60GB internal HD). Also, find took a fraction of the CPU time.

Okay, I'll definitely look into "find" again.

Seriously, you gotta do something about that search algorithm. First off, limit it to the directories:

/Applications
/Games
~/Applications
~/Games

Uh. What's "Games"? Right now, Shovel scans:

/Applications
/Developer/Applications
~/

I've never seen "Games" on any machine.

This will keep it from scanning my dev directory (which is good because anything that's in development shouldn't be updated as it's *in development*), which will keep it from spending 10 minutes on my darwinports directory. It also keeps it from scanning any other arbitrary directory. The directories to scan should also be a pref, but defaulting to those 4 listed above.

I'd prefer to avoid having options in there. The less people have to set up, the better.

Another thing - is there any point in listing applications which aren't MacPAD-enabled? I don't really need a list of all my applications, and if I did, I think System Profiler can give me that. It would be much better to simply list the MacPAD-enabled applications.

It is intentional. Right now there are few "MacPAD-enabled" applications. Showing users which other third-party applications are there but aren't MacPAD may encourage them to ask the authors to add MacPAD support. And it also makes Shovel much more useful, as you'll have a central point for listing all third-party applications on your Mac.

Also (I don't know if you do this already since it's stil scanning my darwinports directory, but I doubt it), once you're done scanning, save the whole thing out to disc.

Shovel uses a Cache.

Oh, and the MacPAD checking isn't working. Once Shovel found my app (Rendezvous Browser, which, unsurprisingly, is up to date), it tried scanning. It's been 10 minutes (10 minutes spent scanning my darwinports directory which it's *still* stuck on) and it still says "checking...", even though when my app checks itself it takes less than a second.

Uh what? I guess your main thread is still blocked? You don't need to do anything to actively check for updates. When it scans your hard disk, it will automatically check for new versions. The only thing you can do after that is to "update marked", if you want.

This looks like a decent start, but it's not yet usable.

Thanks for pointing out the problems you had so far. I'll definitely try to at least prevent users from causing the main thread to block (which is actually a good thing, since otherwise you'd be stepping on the thread doing the scanning ... but I don't suppose my users will care much ;-) ), and I'll try to make scanning faster.

--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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References: 
 >[ANN] Shovel - Third-Party "Software Update" (From: "M. Uli Kusterer" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: [ANN] Shovel - Third-Party "Software Update" (From: Kevin Ballard <email@hidden>)



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