Disclaimer: I'm a newbie blogger and member of HN (though I've been reading it for a while, I just joined a week ago). But any comments, criticism, or advice you might have are all definitely welcome. Thanks!
An OK article. But if you have seen most good usability and UI design texts, they cite actual applications. You have your own, prototype, "hopefully not your application" dialog boxes as examples. If you can't find real-world examples of the problems you're fixing, maybe they're not that big of a deal? (which they ARE, you just haven't been researching this long enough, I am guessing.)
I clicked on the link hoping to find technical information on automatic software updating, like:
It's not that I didn't have anything in mind (I did, and, in earlier drafts, used some), it's that I felt this got the point across faster and simpler. Using the examples I gave and real-life screenshots felt too much like flamebait for my taste. I definitely see your point though.
My company develops an updater/patcher. The updater is open source (wyUpdate) and the update creator is commercial (wyBuild).
You make a few good points in your post. We get a lot of customers trying to solve the very problems you describe. Auto updating in particular is an exceedingly hard problem to solve.
Besides all of the immediately obvious technical considerations (Self updating, inter-process communication, update rollback on failure) there are many problems that developers don't think about until it's too late (admin rights, Vista/7 UAC).
You might be interested in the series of posts I've been writing on creating an updater from scratch: http://wyday.com/blog/
