Hi,

there seems to be something mixed up.
1. Development of Bitcoin's protocol and overall functionality as a system
2. Bitcoin as a end user software

For now Bitcoin as a system comes into existence only by means of the software (and its UI) which serves as a reference implementation.

My point is that auto-updating is a UI feature and thus almost irrelevant for Bitcoin as a system (and its success).
Rather than throwing more (UI-related) work in here, things like that should probably better be moved out of the way of busy people like Gavin.

I think auto-update is definitely very convenient for the average user, even for a lot of technical sophisticated people, I suppose.
Still, feature rich user experience should better be left to sophisticaed UI clients with all the user experience bells&whistles eg. auto-updates.

An idea for an easy-to-use UI: I just came across Adobe AIR which might be used to bundle bitcoind with bitcoin-js-remote by tcatm, thus creating a desktop alternative for the wxBitcoin client with an appealing, feature rich UI and built in auto-updating. Has anybody experience with this programming environment?

regards,
Marco