Are you tired of every application you open offering to install an update before you can use it? Do you wish you could take care of all those updates at once? Updatest is an application made for exactly this.
I’ve talked about Homebrew for Mac, which is a command line tool for installing and updating Mac software. Updatest scans all the software on your computer and updates it using Homebrew, even if you didn’t initially install it that way. But there’s more. Many applications use an open source tool called Sparkle to offer updates, and Updatest can find and update all of them. The application can also identify applications downloaded from GitHub that have newer releases, along with any application you downloaded from the Mac App Store.
Basically, if an application has updates, Updatest can find them and install them for you. To get started, click the download button on the app’s website (you can also install using Homebrew, if you’ve already set that up). The application will tell you a bit about how it works, ask you which categories of applications you want to update using the tool, and offer to install Homebrew if you haven’t done that already.
Once you’re done with all of that, you will see a list of all the applications on your system. You can filter to see only the apps that need updates, if you want.
Click any application to learn more about the update. From here you can install the update. Alternatively, you can click the Bulk Update button below the search bar to update all of your outdated applications at once. You can watch the updates happen by clicking the Terminal button in the top-right corner, or you can let the application do its thing while you work on something else.
What do you think so far?
Some updates require passwords, in which case you’ll be asked to run the update command in the Terminal.
Credit: Justin Pot
And in some cases, applications from the Mac App Store won’t update—in my tests, this was mostly iPad apps I’ve installed. The application will instead give you a link to open the App Store and install the update.
These minor annoyances are inevitable, and not too burdensome. And it’s nice to be able to check all of my applications for updates in once place. If you’re interested, there’s a 15-day free trial, allowing you to get a feel for how the application works. After that you can buy a personal license, which works on up to three Macs, for $9.99; a household license, which works on up to 10 Macs, costs $19.99.
