Jakub Anderwald

I never liked Quicktime. The Windows player for it was always incompatible, slow, hanging. It also used it’s own chrome, so it never looked like Windows software. Since some time, due to fancy Apple Software update, it was trying to push some other Apple software (Safari and iTunes mostly) to your system with every update.

Because of that I never wanted to install the Quicktime player on my machines. I tried using Quicktime alternative codecs, or avoided having videos in Quicktime, but there’s always a situation when you get a quicktime video and have to see it, at least once.

Recently, I found a solution to that. I just upload the quicktime video to YouTube as private, and then decide if it’s worth keeping or not. I know it’s a twisted way, very slow and error-prone, but I am so happy I don’t need to install the player that I can spare those 10 minutes of my time.

This made me think: how far can you go in hating a product? I mean, the player is just a player, but I feel so much discomfort when I have to install it, that I will do a lot to avoid it. I felt the same way about Java applications, and luckily, they’re gone. It should be some kind of a warning sign for the seoftware vendor: if people hate you enough to use their time and resources (bandwidth in this case) just to avoid using it, you should rethink your strategy. Seriously.

Having your new, shiny Windows Mobile phone, full of connectivity options must be a bless! Or it would be, if not the short battery life. You need to disable Bluetooth and use WiFi / GPS only when needed, right?

Not anymore.

There’s a small tool which I’ve just discovered – WiFi Locations. It allows you to automatically enable / disable WiFi or Bluetooth in selected locations. And it detects your location based on GSM (or UMTS) cell ID – no need for GPS.

It’s a battery and time (since you don’t have to tediously enable/disable WiFi at home) saver.

You can download it and see newest comments on the XDA-Developers thread.

I think it’s the time for all software developers to realize that automatic software update is a must. It doesn’t matter if it’s a instant messaging program (thus always connected to the Internet) or a standalone video player.

You can safely assume that user either is always connected to the Internet, or sometime will be. Use that time and just check if there’s a newer version, and if there is – notify the user. Don’t download anything, don’t try to automatically install the update, just notify. That’s enough.

It’s 2008, let’s fully use the potential Internet gives us. You can patch bugs this way or push new features – one way or another, you’ll make majority of your users a bit happier. And they won’t have to do a thing for it to happen. I think the days where you read in a newspaper that there is a new version of some software, and then tried finding it, should be gone.

However, such an auto-update must be trusted by the users. Otherwise they’ll be just “clicking off” your reminders and getting more and more angry at your software.

How to make it user-friendly? Follow the 3 rules:

1/ It can’t be annoying. If your app wants to check for an update, it doesn’t have to tell the user every time it does.

It also doesn’t need an “advanced” button just for checking if you have pushed an update. Come on, let people do their job.

2/ Don’t try to smart-ass the user. Don’t try to make him do something else, “just by the way”. Update notification should mean “hey, there’s something new!” for him, not “they’re trying to make me do something I don’t want, again”. Don’t follow the inglorious way of Apple Software Update.

3/ Make sure it’s easy to disable the auto-update functionality in options.