Now, the concept is certainly good.  Have a program automatically check for new versions so that people can keep up to date.  But the fundamental flaw I find is that this check always takes place when you first start the program.  At this point, you're trying to use the program immediately and don't want to wait for it to download and install an update first.  So I always cancel out and never get the needed updates.  So the notification turns into nothing more than a nuisance.

So I thought of a solution, but it would be quite a feat to pull off, and it's not without problems.  What we need is an update agent that checks for updates behind the scenes and informs the user in a non-intrusive way based on how the user set it up.  A single program that will support checking for updates for multiple products.  That way the user would have a central place to view and optionally install these updates, or could configure them to automatically install when that program is not in use.  No more annoying pop-ups when you're trying to use the software.

But here's where the difficulty of such a solution comes in:  As far as I know, there is no standard for distributing updates.  To implement a standard, it would require the cooperation of the vendor for each piece of software.  The other option would be to make the program extensible so that anyone can write a plug-in for it to add support for a particular piece of software.  Now I could certainly write a framework to support this in my sleep and use duck typing for cross-version plug-in support, that would not be a challenge.  The problem is that I can't possibly write a plug-in for every piece of software in existence, or even most.  I'm not exactly good at promoting standards either.

But I'm wondering if I should make the solution for myself anyway, and implement plug-ins for the software that I use, and make it available for free and see what happens...