I approached this with a health bit of skepticism. Cnet's continuing failure to update the Versiontracker site with a category for Mac OS 10.6 has become something of a joke at this point. So surely this app would suck. Right? Right? Actually I was quite surprised over how many apps I had that were outdated, a few by quite some months. So I set out to get the updates.

Getting the updates was a bit more laborious than necessary. The TechTracker app launches the Cnet website from which you can download the updates that the app found were needed. First thing that annoyed me was how the site was non-functional for as long as Safari AdBlocker was active. Whitelisting the site didn't work, so I had to resort to disabling it. I'm not sure what the problem is just yet... I'm guessing Cnet detected it and loaded a useless version of the site. So okay... I'll humor them and disable it. But MAN what a load of ads. Yuck!

Okay, so that all aside, telling TechTracker to get the updates gives me a webpage listing the apps I have installed, the status of what is in need of updates, and what versions are available. Clicking each app for an update resulted in a pop-up window that would tell me I was about to download a file, then the file download progress window would open. So then I had to close the other window and go back to the window with the apps list to get to the next app needing downloading, and repeat. Additionally, there were a few apps that didn't auto-download, but rather I got re-directed to the developer's site and had to go find the update myself. So anyway, with some 30+ updates available, this was a LOT of window opening and closing. Ideally, I'd like to just click a link on the page with the full list of my apps and start the download, not get a pop-up window as a bonus. I guess Cnet is pretty determined to shove a bunch of ads at me. Since this is a free service, and a rather convenient one, I guess that's the price to pay.

Anywho, the updates were largely very successful. I did encounter a couple issues with some updates. Despite having the most recent version of a few apps, TechTracker continued to insist that I didn't have them yet. The "About" page of these apps showed the version number that TT said I needed to update to, so what the heck? Well on opening the package contents of these apps, I found that the embedded Info.plist file in each of these had the wrong version number as an entry. Editing those files myself to show the correct version number finally silenced TechTracker. This is NOT a problem with the TechTracker app, I should say. It is getting the version info from these plists, and the developer is the one who is at fault here.

So overall, I have to give a big thumbs up to TechTracker. Yes, if you have a lot of updates, it will be tedious to get them, though admittedly far less tedious than checking each app manually. Once you get past that hump, it will be much less annoying to grab an occasional update.