Re: Check for Updates... in Help menu?

[Mike Beltzner]

On 5-Mar-08, at 9:26 AM, Mike Shaver wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:45 AM, Steven Garrity
> <stev...@silverorange.com> wrote:
>> I wondered why the "Check for Updates..." option lives in the Help
>> menu.
>> This seems like an odd place for it. If I were to guess, I'd expect
>> it
>> to live in the "Tools" menu.
>
> It's on Help on most other apps that do their own updates, though I
> also find it unnatural and even after a few years of using it still
> find myself looking in Tools!

Quite so. I actually had the same instinct back in Firefox 1.5 when we
were making major changes to the way we do application updates, and
was pretty shocked to find that "Help" is the "natural" place for this
function on Windows.

Microsoft Applications now all update through a seperate app (Windows
Product Updater) and a lot of other third-party applications have
taken to writing their own little update utilities that run on startup
to varying success, usually throwing a dialog in the user's face.

> (I checked iTunes, Lightroom, and Rhapsody on Windows, not sure I have
> any other apps there that self-update.)

Paint.NET, Notepad++, yeah, pretty much all of them.

>> I see there's a bug for moving this item to the Application menu on
>> OS X
>> [1].
>
> Yeah, I think that's the new hotness on OS X.

Indeed. I think I recall the problem there being that we currently
redraw the menuItem content based on state. So it can be "Check for
updates..." or "Downloading update..." or "Apply downloaded update".
The way we get access to the Applications menu is, however, one-time-
only. So the objection to moving it there was that we would lose that
important state based information.

I'm not sure though, upon further reflection and time-nurtured-
ballsyness when it comes to fighting OSX stop-energies, that's the
right tradeoff to make, discoverability-vs-functionality wise. I shall
mention so in the bug you reference.

cheers,
mike

[Steven Garrity]

I wondered why the "Check for Updates..." option lives in the Help menu.
This seems like an odd place for it. If I were to guess, I'd expect it
to live in the "Tools" menu.

Is there a rationale for this?

I see there's a bug for moving this item to the Application menu on OS X
[1].

Cheers,
Steven Garrity

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306018

[Mike Shaver]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:45 AM, Steven Garrity
<stev...@silverorange.com> wrote:

> I wondered why the "Check for Updates..." option lives in the Help menu.
> This seems like an odd place for it. If I were to guess, I'd expect it
> to live in the "Tools" menu.

It's on Help on most other apps that do their own updates, though I

also find it unnatural and even after a few years of using it still
find myself looking in Tools!

(I checked iTunes, Lightroom, and Rhapsody on Windows, not sure I have

any other apps there that self-update.)

> I see there's a bug for moving this item to the Application menu on OS X
> [1].

Yeah, I think that's the new hotness on OS X.

Mike