Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
How would you suggest the update be changed to be easier?
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Considering the bandwidth discussion, it may be financially worthwhile to make updates less frequent, less prominent, or both. I was considering bandwidth before and figured that maybe getting the donate button in front of people offset the costs of having the app downloaded and re-downloaded more often than necessary. If fundraising (which I would hardly call a conspiracy) is not the goal, then it might be worth revamping the process to discourage such frequent downloads.
How often people are actually updating, I don't know. Personally, when a program prompts me to update, I tend to assume the developer wants us to download that update. In practice, I only open Calibre once or twice per month on average, anyway. I would guestimate I've downloaded Calibre maybe 15 times in the past year because, "Oh, button! I'll click on it." That's around 800MB downloaded, when in terms of features I probably would have been fine updating once, maybe twice all year.
I'm sure Kovid knows his options. The least disruptive would be to default disable the update dialog--available updates are still displayed on the bottom information bar in Calibre. A step further would be to flag some updates as "recommended" (major bug fix, major feature addition), mark those in red in the main interface, and have the default notification behavior be "recommended updates only," with "all updates" as an additional check box.
Those changes would conserve bandwidth, leave the preference twiddling to power users, and reduce frustration for casual users who want to stay up to date, but don't want update prompts interrupting our workflow nearly every time we open the program.