Joel on Procreation

Joel Spolsky writes about DNA replication, I mean, elegance. Go read it – it’s entertaining as usual. I particularly like the reference to automatic updates.

If your software cannot automatically determine whether an update is appropriate then you have no business adding an automatic update feature to your product. Don’t ask users to make configuration decisions that most users cannot possibly make.

I also don’t mind if an application asks me whether I would like to install an update when I fire it up, but don’t go installing services and notify icons just so that it can annoy me with pop-ups out of context that I don’t want to be bothered with.

© 2006 Kenny Kerr