One of the trends in software that I’m not that excited about is the contstantly-updating, minor patch-releasing, weekly pop-up rendering annoyances of modern applications.
Among the worst offenders (in my mind) is Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader for Windows. It seems like it’s always downloading something. Microsoft would be at the top of the list, but it is the operating system, and I recognize the need for windows to keep its security profiles up-to-date.
I prefer the option to check myself for updates and decide myself whether I want to install it. I’ll do it at my own convenience thank you (especially if it requires a restart). And for that, I appreciate the option to do it on my own time. This is how I’ve got Windows set, and any other application that gives me the option.
And so it was, with this attitude, that I finally decided to get around to updating my website photo management software (Gallery). Ahh, such naivety. Did I really think that I could simply backup all the files on my website, and the database, and clear the caches, and deactivate the plugins and modules, and upload the new application files, and install them, and configure the installer, and actually get the site working?!
Needless to say it didn’t go so well. It took me an entire day to get through the whole process of updating the website (oh.. and backing out all of the changes and getting the site back to the state it was in before I started the whole process). Painful indeed. But thankfully it was a rainy, nasty Saturday so what else did I have to do?
So once I had the site back to normal, back to the way it was before I tried to update, what did I do? Oh, of course, I tried again! Ugh. Fool me twice… Thankfully I was a little better prepared the second time (and I made sure my backups were truly backups, not just mocking, incomplete similarities to the original files) and it only took a couple of hours to go through the grating process of upgrading and downgrading the site.
Suddenly, the version of the software I’m using looks just as good as it did the day I first installed it. What new features could I possibly need? I think this version will suit me just fine for at least another year, until the pain of this experience has worn off sufficiently for me to try again.