I found something the other day that’s a little annoying about the Mac. Since I only reboot once in a great while, usually when a security update forces me to, which isn’t very often, upon each reboot I am usually confronted by a lot of my software notifying me that updates are available, which causes me to spend the next little while downloading and installing said updates.
I’ve gone weeks, even months between reboots and also between application launches, and am annoyed when some applications have gone through five or more updates, mostly bug related updates, that I was not aware of.
This is not a problem with the Mac, per se, but rather with some of the automatic software checking libraries that are used. In fact, I blame lazy developers. There is a free, open source, library out there called Sparkle that a developer can add to their application to accomplish update checking, and many do. From a quick scan of the documentation, I gleamed that, by default, Sparkle checks for updates on application launch. Upon further quick glances, I further gleamed that it seems to be relatively easy for a developer to implement periodic checks, and that said periodic checks could be user configurable. The fact that some developers do not do this is just lazy.
