The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for products and services .(June 2016) |
Original author(s) | Andy Matuschak |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Sparkle Project (2014–present) |
Initial release | January 9, 2006 |
Stable release | 2.6.0 / March 15, 2024 |
Repository | |
Written in | Objective-C, Swift |
Operating system | macOS |
Type | Software update |
License | MIT License |
Website | sparkle-project |
Sparkle is an open-source software framework for macOS designed to simplify updating software for the end user of a program. Sparkle's primary means of distributing updates is through "appcasting," a term coined for the practice of using an RSS enclosure to distribute updates and release notes.
Sparkle 0.1 (beta) was released in January 2006 by Andy Matuschak to provide apps "instant self-update" functionality, which very few applications had at the time. [1]
In August 2009, Sparkle added support for delta updates for installing smaller and faster incremental updates. This was first used to update WebKit's nightly builds. [2]
In 2016, Radek discovered a man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability in applications that use Sparkle to receive updates through an unencrypted channel. [3]
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for an office suite, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, Object Linking and Embedding data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand.
macOS, originally Mac OS X, previously shortened as OS X, is an operating system developed and marketed by Apple since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and laptop computers, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows and ahead of all Linux distributions, including ChromeOS.
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HomeKit, also known as Apple Home, is a software framework and communication protocol developed by Apple Inc. that lets users configure, communicate with and control smart-home appliances using Apple devices. It provides users with a way to automatically discover such devices and configure them. By designing rooms, items and actions in HomeKit, users can enable automations in the home through a voice command to Siri or through the Home app. With HomeKit, developers are able to create complex applications in order to manage accessories at a high level.
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macOS Catalina is the sixteenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. It is the successor to macOS Mojave and was announced at WWDC 2019 on June 3, 2019 and released to the public on October 7, 2019. Catalina is the first version of macOS to support only 64-bit applications and the first to include Activation Lock. It is also the last version of macOS to have the major version number of 10; its successor, Big Sur, released on November 12, 2020, is version 11. In order to increase web compatibility, Safari, Chromium and Firefox have frozen the OS in the user agent running in subsequent releases of macOS at 10.15.7 Catalina.