"Only check for updates" should retain icons during manual updating.

[leeoniya]

currently, if you do "Only check for updates" and then try to update only some packages manually, the update indicator icons all reset as soon as any update is initiated. it would be more useful for them to remain because you may choose to update one package at a time without losing the ability to see what still needs to be updated.

 

i'm still going say that the update indicators should NOT replace the icons, but should be broken out into their own sortable column. and perhaps make a different color indicator (light blue?) for showing an update is available, rather than reusing the "updated" icon for this.

 

it would also be cool if the available update version (eg {ver}) was broken out into a different column.

 

with these in place, 1.0 time! very excite!

Leon

[floele]

I don't like the additional column idea actually. What's the purpose of the last idea?

 

BTW, you can also select multiple applications and then update them per rightclick if you want to update some specific applications only.

[leeoniya]

breaking out the update indicator into a different column would allow you to sort/group all apps that need to be updated together which is very handy if you have a large list of apps for which you run "check updates only". alternitively it would be okay to optionally auto-filter out packages that dont need updates after the check-only, this may be a good compromise.

 

another reason to break out the indicator is if the package has an associated icon that is displayed with it already, it would make sense for it to always be displayed to visually locate packages quickly. i dont understand why the update indicator replaces the package icon, it kind of defeats the purpose of having the icon there to begin with if it cant be counted on to be seen all the time.

 

the last idea can give you an indication of how big the version jump will be between updates. perhaps you only want to run minor updates rather than major, as it may break APIs, license key files and such. having a version-to-be-updated-to column, as well as current version column, can give a user indication of whether or not s/he wants to run the update manually or not.

 

i think an "update available" status indicator should not be the same as "updated" indicator.

 

i guess some of the suggestions are more of a workflow preference, but it would be nice to have more manual control over the process for the reasons indicated.

Edited January 5, 2009 by Leeoniya

[Stalker]

i dont understand why the update indicator replaces the package icon, it kind of defeats the purpose of having the icon there to begin with if it cant be counted on to be seen all the time.

It is there to give you a quick visual indication which apps were updated. If only updated apps had their icons changed to yellow medal (or whatever the icons shows) than it wouldn't be that distinct.

[leeoniya]

i dont think the program icons should be replaced at all, the indicator needs to be split off entirely in my opinion, keeping it both distinct and separate.

[Stalker]

That would result in too much clutter and with "Updated" icon, again, being not as distinct.

[leeoniya]

i wouldn't consider program icons "clutter". it would still be distinct, because there would be a dedicated column which would work exactly the same way as it does now. however, there would be a lot of additional benefit to retaining program icons and splitting off the update status column. conserving 16px of horizontal space can be done in numerous other ways, such as displaying a percentage instead of progress bar, i feel like there's too much benefit that can be attained through dividing the functionally different visuals.