I apologize if you took my attempt to be brief for any kind of emotional reaction. I was simply trying to be brief and efficient.
Having said that, I will try to be more verbose.
1. I verified this and filed a bug report. As far as I know it is supposed to be black on white, but the installer vendor sometimes also changes things without telling us.
2. There really is no good place to do that to be honest. Prompting you after the new version was installed and you try to open an "old" project file will annoy you, since it will potentially make you back out everything.
Putting it in the log file should happen, but we are aware that many users only read this after they encounter an issue. I will discuss with the team what possible options are available. As we only do this rarely and only for very good reasons
this should not affect you very often. But I hope you understand that we cannot hold back necessary changes to file formats because one or the other user does not want to update.
3. I will keep that for the end....
4. If the update tool starts (it does not download any updates automatically) and shows you a list of changes it means that it can connect to the server and get the new configuration file. That implies the tool is not blocked or prevented from
accessing the internet. As there is no error message, it most likely thinks it downloaded everything and all is a-ok. Most commonly this occurs if you run software on your machine, gateway, proxy etc that prevents downloading executable files.
Unfortunately we cannot examine your network from here. But if you have any additional information on how your network is configured, please do post it here. In the meantime, you can ALWAYS get the latest build from your SAPIEN account page.
We used a Win32 API call for downloading previously, but since that is blocked on MANY systems, we had to replace that. It is entirely possible that this is the one thing that worked on your system
Now back to 3.
Popping up a message box to warn a user about something he or she does not understand is not useful. Popping up a message box to make a user verify to do what he just told the software to do is, well, annoying
Modern user interface design principles teach that you should avoid message boxes like the plague. I am going into great detail here because people lurking here design GUIs, so this may help.
I have asked if you switched off STA not knowing what it is. The reason I asked this two fold. For one, if you just turned it off to see if we prompt you, well, not much I can do about that. Hit that iceberg then, full ahead
Secondly, if you did not know what it was, I have to ask why you turned that know without knowing what it is. I am not trying to imply anything, I simply would like to know what the thought process was. This will help us decide what to do with this.
We can simply take the option away, we can make the tooltip more verbose or we can hide the option in a place where it is only available to those who really need to flip that bit.
So why not simply popping up a message box you ask? Because it is not helpful.
1. Most users, and this has been proven over and over, press OK on any popup as a reflex. If you ask them why they pushed it, they tend to not know. You may be different, I do not know you, but ask anyone who wrote applications for Windows 3.x where these dialogs have been a constant source of, um, discussion.
2. Prompting the user to acknowledge the change he just made does not help someone understand what they did. Alan Cooper (GUI design book: The inmates are running the asylum) calls this the "Acknowledge you are stupid" dialog or something along those lines. No offense intended.
3. Let's say we really try to make the popup helpful. "Turning off this option will result in your script not working if you use one of the following: etc etc ad nauseam" If you do not use any of these features AT THIS MOMENT you will still say yes. Three months later when you add the file open dialog you will not remember this question (most will just have pressed ok without reading it)
4. In the meantime this dialog will drive anyone crazy who toggles that bit regularly for a reason. Why does this always ask me to verify what I just told it to do?
5. Last but not least, if we add one here, you will come back and say: You added a dialog here, now add one there too.
We do not want that.
I hope this makes it more clear and did not darken your office mood too much