atomicbird

Update: SparklePlus charts can now be found on my Sparkle Stats page, updated nightly.

Last year when I was getting MondoMouse ready for release, one of the things I really wanted was an automatic-update system, so that the software could locate and optionally install new versions of itself. Though I try to make as much noise as possible over new releases, people often don't know about them. And even if they do, downloading and installing by hand can be a pain if there are a lot of updates.

Enter Sparkle, a Cocoa framework designed to do exactly that with a minimum of effort.

But that wasn't all I wanted to add. One chronic problem for developers is figuring out what versions of the operating system needed continued support, and which could be dropped. If I don't know if any of my users are still on, say, 10.3, how do I know if I need to continue supporting it? I don't want to waste time with it if nobody's using it, but at the same time I don't want to accidentally strand a huge number of users because my gut feeling turned out to be wrong.

Basically I needed something like the OmniGroup's statistics page. That would mean having MondoMouse-- with the user's permission, of course-- periodically send my server some anonymous information about their Mac, including what version of Mac OS X they're using. Since Sparkle would already be contacting my server on a regular schedule to check for updates, it seemed the ideal solution was to send this information along at the same time.

So I modified Sparkle and created SparklePlus. It did the same thing as Sparkle but with the addition of this anonymous information about people's Macs.

In the spirit of being as open as possible about the process, I always intended to make this information publicly available. But getting that set up was harder than it seemed and became easy to put off.

Until today. Here's some of what I've been collecting.

MondoMouse users are adopting Leopard at a surprisingly fast pace. Just a couple of weeks after release, 45% of MondoMouse users have upgraded:

The Intel/PowerPC ratio has been surprisingly stable though:

Same goes for the number of CPU cores on people's Macs, though it's interesting that nearly 80% have at least two:

There are a number of other details collected, but I haven't been able to develop useful plots of them all yet. For example SparklePlus reports how much RAM is installed, but there are too many different values to show them all and so far my plot-generation script can't coalesce values into ranges.

My plan is to set up a special page for this information, and have the charts updated on a weekly basis. That should be coming soon.