Rutba Office now tells you when a release is waiting, in every window

Since version 1.7, an installed copy of Rutba Office has looked for a newer release, downloaded it in the background and installed it the next time you quit. That is the right mechanism: an update never interrupts work, and a release you were not offered cannot be applied. What it lacked was the sentence that goes with it. The only sign that anything had happened was a small chip on the launcher.

Most people who work in Rutba Word all day never look at the launcher. A copy that updates in silence is a copy whose owner never learns what changed, including the fix they were waiting for.

Told in the window you are working in

From 1.13, a release the check finds is announced in every window as soon as it is found, not only on the launcher. The prompt shows the download’s progress. Once the download is complete it offers two buttons:

• Restart and update quits, installs, and opens again on the new version.
• Not now puts that version away: at once in the window you clicked it in, and for a day in every window. After a day it asks again.

Asking again is deliberate. The install still happens when you quit, whatever you clicked, but a copy that is never quit never installs on quit, and plenty of people leave a mail client open for weeks. A day is long enough not to nag, and short enough that a security fix does not wait a month for a reboot.

And a newer release is a new question. “Not now” for 1.13.1 does not cover 1.13.2: a later fix is not something you already said no to.

What the check sends, still

None of this changed what the suite sends. Looking for a release is one request to the public release feed, carrying nothing about you, your documents or your machine, and switching automatic updates off in About means no request is made at all. We gave away our office suite lists both of the suite’s network calls, what each one carries, and how to turn each off.

Every release proved by updating the last one

An update mechanism has a nasty property: the release that breaks it is the last release anybody receives automatically. Everybody on that version stays there, and nobody finds out, because the thing that would have told them is what broke.

So a Rutba Office release is not called done when it builds, or when its own checks pass. The previous release is installed on a test machine and watched until it has found, downloaded and installed the new one by itself. Version 1.11.0 updated itself to 1.12.0 that way on the day 1.12.0 shipped. The prompt is part of the release checks too: once a download is ready it must offer Restart and update, and Not now must put the prompt away for that version while the update service keeps the snooze for a day.