My third post of the day!
How would I go about making a script that could go online to check for a new version of my app. Perhaps it could download a text file with the information to the preferences folder and display it in a window?
There’s numerous ways of getting data over a http connection.
One of the easiest is probably URL Access Scripting:
tell application “URL Access Scripting”
download “http://www.yourserver.net/path/to/latestver.txt” to file (path to temporary items as string) & latestver.txt"
end tell
You can then read the file and see what the latest version is.
Alternatively, to avoid saving it to disk, use something like:
set latestVer to do shell script “curl http://www.yourserver.net/path/to/latestver.txt”
which puts the contents of the file in an AppleScript variable so you can reference it in your script.
Either way, of course, you need to maintain www.yourserver.net with up-to-date information. You should probably also add error handling in your script so that the program still works even if/when www.yourserver.net doesn’t exist or can’t be reached.