An Interesting Experiment
Along with the current beta‘s advancements, the introduction of Sparkle Plus allows for even nicer upgrading. A specific advantage of the system is the anonymous data submission which is an integral (although optional, for those of you wearing tinfoil hats) part of the upgrading process.
A nifty little program I’ve been working on with regards to the Sparkle project is our Sparkle Plus Information page. The page features graphs (bar and line) of the various data being submitted by Sparkle. A lot of the results are still inaccurate (for example, the submission of data can sometimes occur too often, swaying the results), but I believe they are an interesting thing to bring to light. Just wanted to pass on the cool information we’ve been gathering the past few weeks. 🙂
Update: Oh, I forgot to mention, the source is released under a BSD license. 🙂 You can check it out in our SVN at http://svn.adiumx.com/adium/sparkle or you can browse it at our Trac SVN browser. Remember I still consider the code to be beta, so don’t be too alarmed at random bugs that crop up! The folder “adium” contains the adium-specific code that I use for the IMServices field (and any future Adium-specific fields).
This code, however, reduces the ability to coorelate data between different fiends to individual users. That is, it no longer stores reports as a report per person, but sums up the results given. This is both for privacy and practical purposes: we’d have millions of rows per year if we were to keep the data coorelated, and the processing time would be through the roof.