The yes/no ok/cancel order is already reversed from what most people are used to. People coming from a windows world are used to the first button being the “do it” button and the second being the “don’t do it” button. So they naturally tend to the get it wrong. And when they see the word Restart, they click.

The choices should be something like:

Cancel Restart | Restart Now

So the first word the person sees is Cancel. Yes, I know not everyone reads ltr. Yes, the text is clear. But people are fallible and they tend to click the first likely candidate.

We can’t trust them to be there, either. We have to assume they are not. (They shouldn’t be, anyway; window titles are silly).

In fact, I have a strong suspicion that there is such a detail in the HIG…

And, yes, it is entirely possible to hide the window and keep working – that’s what the Restart Later button is for. With a more readable dialog text the user will be better able to understand what that means: an incomplete update.

Good post and good plan! Keep going!

1) I would be pretty pissed that I was being told to restart without giving a reason why.
2) A restart isn’t actually “required”. In fact, it is entirely possible to hide that window, and continue with what you were doing. I feel the original nicely explains the situations under which it is important to restart.
3) I dont read the headers within window title bars, and so a large header within the window itself is useful.

Capable doesn’t mean all services/applications *are* restarted. Firefox updates get a separate “You need to restart firefox…” dialogue. Other applications (to my knowledge) either trigger a full restart-required flag or just don’t tell the user.

Restarting a service or application can destructive so there needs to be user-interaction/permission.

Perhaps the restart app could be a little more intelligent and tell the user which applications need to be restarted and actually do the restarting for them (once they’ve saved data).

And also allow just GDM to restart for X/graphics-driver updates.

There’s a lot more to the restart-required process than the dialogue that needs re-engineering.

Attached to the bug you can see my bzr branch that I managed to cajole Michael Vogt (a personal friend of mine) into agreeing to upload about an hour before feature freeze.

The final version of the dialog is actually a mix between MPT’s suggestion and mine: “The computer needs to restart to finish installing updates. Please save your work before continuing.”

@I_Artist and @ethana2: You’re right that all programs should prompt you to save before allowing themselves to be closed at reboot, however when we say “save your work” we also mean “make sure you’re done”, and I think the new version gets that message across. It is, of course, something that will end up getting a lot of user testing.

Run the update manager, install everything that can be installed without a restart, then alert the user the system needs to be restarted to apply further upgrades, kill nautilus so the user cannot use the computer while the system critical upgrading is being done, then restart the computer.

It looks a lot longer than it actually is.. Anyone who’s installed . patches on OS X can testify.