A simple matter of…

I have an android smartphone and whilst overall I’m very happy, the marketplace is definitely a very disappointing weak spot. Searching takes an _age_ (this is from _the_ search company) and often fails – although sometimes a reboot then picks up the application!

I have installed atrackdog to tell me which programs need updating, however it’s not perfect – partly because the marketplace is naff or doesn’t have the application in question, partly because you sometimes see development versions before they are generally available.

What I’ve never understood (particularly on windows) is the state where each application checks to see if there is a later version. Often they do this on startup (no, I want to _use_ the application, not wait for it to check to see if there is a later version).

Most Linux distributions do a really good job of this – one central way to check for versions and upgrade.

However I wonder if we can’t do something better – perhaps using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish/subscribe Publish/Subscribe] to get updates more quickly and without polling. Using all these newfangled pubsubhub architectures, I would hope scaling wouldn’t be an issue – at least not more so than current methods.