I wanted to install an update to some of my music software today, on Windows XP. Here’s the story.

I found out about the update via email, because there is no single place to find out about updated software. Obviously Windows isn’t a closed ecosystem so a single update point might be an unreasonable thing to ask, but it’s a shame there is no obvious central place that notifies you of updates: just an RSS stream with app name, version number, and a download link would be enough, and one program could read that once every startup. Instead, all your software asks to run at startup just so that it can check for its own updates, slowing your boot times and sometimes leaving stuff taking up memory. Not great.

The update was not for the app itself but for the samples, and the sample pack update had a version number of 1.0.5: did I need it? I don’t know. The software doesn’t tell me what version the samples are. It’s not in the Help -> About menu, because that’s just the software itself. It’s not noted in the Start Menu either. Nor in the Add/Remove Progams dialogue. So I just have to install it and hope for the best. Why is there no standard way of finding version numbers, in 2011? Even if different vendors have different ideas of what a version number should mean, there should still be a single place you go to find them.

I read the readme file that came alongside the installer. It tells me I need to navigate to the right directory if I’ve moved the samples. I might have done, so I bear that in mind. I run the installer, and at no point does it offer me the option of navigating to the right directory. Instead, it finds the correct location of the samples and patches them. Except, it doesn’t really. It seems to have done everything 1 directory level up from where it should have, so now I have to work out whether I can just copy them over by hand. Grr. Did I mention that the installer proudly said 1.0.4 in the title bar, not 1.0.5?

I go to their website to search the forum to see if anybody has (a) any idea how to find the version of what is installed(not because I need that any more, but because I’m intrigued as to whether it’s even possible), and (b) whether everybody has a problem with the directory structure when upgrading, or if it’s just me. I get asked for a username and password. I don’t know my username and password. I hate passwords (as you can see in my previous post on the issue) but this is especially bad because I need to use one account and password to authenticate my software and another account (and potentially another password) to use the software’s forum. I click the ‘forgotten password’ option, and have a reset link sent to my email account. I click the link, and it emails a new random password to my email account in plain text. I spend 15 seconds getting angry that they’ll send me a forum password via plain text email but won’t store anything server-side that lets me actually retrieve my original password, 15 more seconds amused that the random password they generated for me was ‘dddd5ddd’, and plough on.

I get into the forum, and enter a search term with 2 keywords. I am given a list of all results that match either of the 2 keywords. I feel like we’re back in the days of Altavista vs. Yahoo when search engines thought it was better to give you more results rather than better results. Then, Google demonstrated that when people typed “A B”, they really wanted A and B, not A or B – has the rest of the world not noticed yet? I suppose it was only 11 years ago, after all. Anyway, none of the hundreds of results seemed at all relevant to my problem, so I gave up.

Now this was an extreme case, but it’s rare for me to not encounter at least one issue similar to one of the above during any installation or upgrade. As software developers, we should do better than this. Right?