I suddenly realised that I hate having to install updated versions of software by hand. For most of my software I rely on them to:
- Tell me that a new version is out
- Ask me if I want to grab that version
- Seemlessly upgrade and hopefully not enforce a reboot!
There have been some products which tease me, as they tell me “Hey, there is a new version out! Er. Go get it!”.
Not only would it be nice to have the software just grab the damn update, but I often am unsure whether I should uninstall the previous version first (as I wouldn’t want this new version to just go on top of it and leave orphans, or worse), or install on top of the latest version (as I want to make sure all settings and data are saved). On Windows I don’t want to have multiple versions in my Add/Remote Software control panel.
We have Windows Update, and Software Update for OS X. I wish that all programs could take part in these worlds. I want to have a simple way to install, update, go back to a version, etc etc for a given program (a la rpm and friends). However only a few programs play this game, and most manage this all themselves…. for valid reasons (you can’t get anything put in the Windows Update area!).
If the update process was standardized then anyone could play…. use the same infrastructure (just a few lines of code to tie into the OS system).
Having software like web browsers on this system is huge. I *hope* that a lot of people will be automatically on Safari 2.0.1 because it was auto grabbed for them by OS X.
This is our only hope for progressing the web, and not having to be backwards compatible to Mac IE 4 :/
We need our world to keep upgrading itself and staying up with the game, else we are left with a very low, lowest denominator and rely on leap-frogging only to get higher up the stack.
