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Feature
Update Yourself
Adding a self-updating feature to your application
Issue: 3.3 (January/February 2005)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc is the publisher of
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 13,053
Starting Page Number: 26
RBD Number: 3312
Resource File(s):
3312.sit Updated: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 at 12:04 PM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
In the old days, getting a new version of a program meant going to a store and buying a box with a disk in it. Then the internet came along and we could just go to the company's website and download an update. Today, most programs have a self-update feature which will automatically alert you when there's a new version. You might have thought adding such a feature to your own projects would be difficult, but I'm pleased to tell you that REALbasic 5.5 makes it frightfully simple.
A Simple Approach
There are dozens of ways to implement a self-updating feature; many are complex because they require a client-server architecture, requiring a program running on your website.
However, for basic updating -- alerting your app that a new version exists -- I've chosen a simple approach. This may not offer all the features you require, but it will satisfy most needs.
What's nice about this simple method is not just that it's easy to program, but that it's easy to reuse: all the self-updating code is maintained in a single window so you can simply drag the window into new projects to add a self-updating feature to any program.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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