Software Updates Week

There’re plenty of software updates this week. First up was for Snow Leopard which is updated to Mac OS X 10.6.2, which contains quite a number of fixes (58, apparently) including an important one that involves data loss. Then, the Safari web browser itself, whose updates are distributed separately from Mac OS X, was updated to version 4.0.4. It fixes some security vulnerabilities, and improves performance and stability. Finally, there is also the update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac with version 12.2.3, which fixes stability and security issues.

That’s all happened in just half a week. It could have been worse, had it been some other operating system, and it’s not really all that bothersome if you consider that many of the updates happen automatically. “Automatically”, however, could typically be any time in a one week window, since automatic checks are often configured to happen at weekly intervals. Furthermore, that’s all assuming that you are using your computer and it is connected to the Internet at reasonable broadband speeds.

It’s just one computer, or just one device. Yet there are so many updates to talk about. Sometimes I’d think life would be so much easier had all the software been sufficiently tightly integrated so that users just need to know of one update. Perhaps moving all the apps to the web (or the “Internet”) will make this easier. You’d still need some basic operating system, a web browser, and device drivers to take care of, but I suppose this would be much easier to manage.

Update (13 Nov 2009): To add to the update week is WordPress 2.8.6, released today.