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Broken: Upgrade "reward"
The program was working fine. For months. Never a problem. But I kept getting those popups "helpfully" reminding me that there was a new version.
OK, fine, I thought. What's the harm, I'll just upgrade it real quick.
Then I tried running it again. Oops:
Maybe this time I'll learn my lesson! If there's no immediate, pressing need to get the new version, ignore the reminders. Hang on to the version that works until there's a good reason to change.
In other words: If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it.
It depends entirely on the software, and the upgrades. But browsers should ALWAYS be upgraded, as the upgrades are almost always security related. But on an Intel mac, Safari (or Firefox) is the prefered browser anyway.
This could also be said about the field of personal development, as in the Lifehacker book "Upgrade Your Life." If only more people followed this simple, conservative logic, we would certainly have a saner world.
The message you're seeing sometimes appears in inappropriate situations (i.e. there probably is no architecture mismatch).
You can check by running "file /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino"
Mine looks like this:
Camino: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
Camino (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
Camino (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
And ls -l:
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 paul paul 28169276 Mar 27 11:52 /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino*
I suspect the only problem is with the updating mechanism itself. Just download a fresh version of Camino.
This is so so true. I can't count the number of times I've made my life harder by updating programs. If it's not security related like schwal mentioned, I'm inclined not to go for the updates any more.
I had the same thing happen to me just yesterday, but with a different app. I had to go to the app's website and download the PowerPC version manually. The failure here is really on the part of the developer, who either doesn't have a Universal Binary, or doesn't ensure that the app downloads the proper Intel vs. PowerPC version.
The latest Camino update included security fixes also. Firefox is incredibly slow on the Mac. Camino is significantly faster. And there are probably few or no exploits designed for it to begin with.
thanks, all - i agree, security is a good reason to upgrade; and yes, camino is quite a good browser! simple and fast.
paul - thanks for the tip & details. downloading it again seemed likely to be the fix.
It is especially important not to naively upgrade from the iPhone App Store, from which there is NO going back. For example, the latest version of the Facebook app is buggier than the one it claimed to improve.
It may be worthwhile to postpone upgrading to make sure there's no fallout from an upgrade (Google and support forums are your friends here), but given that new versions of software (especially web browsers) often include new security fixes, withholding on upgrading until forced seems like a bad idea.
Gah. I tried to upgrade my Garmin GPS maps last night, and the upgrade bricked the unit. Now I get to spend a few days thrashing with customer service to get it working again. Wish I'd come across this 24 hours ago...