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DcUpdater v2 Preliminary Flirtations

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Deozaan:
does anyone have any ideas for a gui/workflow that would allow people to decide how to be handle the idea of having multiple releases of a program corresponding to stable/beta versions?  how to present the info to user? how to let user say which they want to be notified about, etc.
-mouser (March 21, 2009, 07:48 PM)
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I think a simple checkbox in the options would be enough to allow the user to decide if they want to keep track of beta releases. Something like:

[] Let me know about beta releases. NOTE: These might be unstable and buggy.

Or it might be a good idea to allow the user to select individually (per program) whether or not to check for betas. In that case you'd need to ask somewhere else and store the choice somewhere so that it is remembered between updates That is, the .dcupdate file won't be a good place to store whether or not betas should be checked because each time you update the app it will replace the .dcupdate file.

And then perhaps the .dcupdate file will contain info about where to find betas and the server.xml file will have an xml tag to indicate stable or not. Though it would probably be better to default to stable (omitting the tag means it is stable) and only require extra stuff for betas.

Is this the kind of information you're asking about?

mouser:
Is this the kind of information you're asking about?
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yes.  i'm trying to decide some of the issues you raised -- e.g. should it be a global setting to look for betas or a per-application setting, do i need to show people both stable version info from web AND beta info? or just one of those based on what they have asked to see, etc.

i'm not really worried about the backend issues of how to check and where to store preferences, as i am with figuring out the user interface aspects to this.

Deozaan:
Is this the kind of information you're asking about?
--- End quote ---
yes.  i'm trying to decide some of the issues you raised -- e.g. should it be a global setting to look for betas or a per-application setting, do i need to show people both stable version info from web AND beta info? or just one of those based on what they have asked to see, etc.-mouser (March 21, 2009, 09:04 PM)
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I would definitely recommend having the option to download and install the stable version even if the user has selected to watch for betas. That way if a beta is too buggy the user will be able to revert back to a stable version.

The more I think about it, the more I think it would be nice to be able to select on a per-application basis. I don't use some applications a lot, or I may not use some of the advanced features of applications (like FARR) so a beta would not likely interest me. But there are other applications I'd love to keep watch for betas, such as DcUpdater itself, or Screenshot Captor, or Trout.

mouser:
Perhaps one solution would be to implement the hierarchy of items in the display (as is already planned), and then for an application that has both a stable and beta release, these 2 releases would be shown as child items under a parent.  By default only 1 child would ever be attemped to update; either the most recent one, or the most recent stable on.  But user could manually choose one to update as well.

mouser:
Screenshot with some grouping enabled.

The idea here is that plugins are all grouped together..
If you are watching multiple version of a program (beta vs. stable), these will also be grouped together
All other "singleton" programs are grouped under the Uncategorized section.

Note that grouping is purely optional and wouldn't be shown if you are just checking for an update to a single application.

DcUpdater v2 Preliminary Flirtations

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