If you have quite a few Apps on your Mac then you’ll know how tedious it can be to open every one of them manually from time to time to see if there are any new updates. Or, worse still, if you’re anything like me you’ll come to open an app for the first time in a couple of months and be prompted to download the newest version just at the moment you want to use it quickly. You’ll ask it to remind you later – which of course you forget all about until the next time you want to use it in a hurry!

I have had a free application called AppFresh installed on my Mac for around a year or so which takes the pain out of manually checking every app by looking for all updates in your applications, dashboard widgets, preference panes and plugins in one go. It does this by checking osx.iusethis.com for new versions. Now all you need to do is remember to run AppFresh occasionally to see what’s available for download. It will even check for Apple’s system updates so you won’t have to run the Software Update separately.

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Once downloaded and opened, AppFresh will run through your apps/pref panes/widgets and will show you the status of everything in it’s sidebar. You can choose to download updates individually or select them all. It will safely download updates to your Downloads folder (or folder of your choice via Preferences) so you can install them. This is generally a case of grabbing hold of the application and dragging it to the Applications folder like you would with any app installation. It will install the updates if considered safe, although this is not selected by default in the application so once again you will need to enter the AppFresh Preferences.

On my last AppFresh update, it showed 41 items as unknown. Many of these were apps that were bundled with my printer and digital camera which don’t have any updater built into them.

So, now all *I* need to do is remember to run AppFresh every once and again to keep my apps all up to date. Now, that won’t be too hard, will it?