Using Sparkle: Release Notes

The release notes viewer is actually a full-fledged WebView?, so you can use advanced CSS and so on in your release notes to make them nice and pretty. There are some templates in the Extras folder of the Sparkle distribution that can help you make snazzier release notes. They’re based on Apple’s help books.

To specify a URL to display for the release notes of a version, you can just set the description of that item to that URL. But if you want to keep your feeds human readable in an RSS reader, you probably want a better description than that. So you can also specify a release notes URL with a sparkle:releaseNotesLink key in an appcast item like this:

<sparkle:releaseNotesLink>
    http://mydomain.org/myapp_3.1.html
</sparkle:releaseNotesLink>

Dynamic release notes

Jacob Godwin-Jones wrote an excellent article on dynamically generating release notes for your Sparkle users on your webserver. With this solution, users upgrading from 2.0 to 2.2 see changes in both 2.1 and 2.2. To learn how to implement it, read Jacob’s article here.