Coming Soon: No Relaunching When Tools Update

Watson users are used to the annoyance of having to re-launch Watson when it downloads updates to its tools. You know the drill: Launch Watson. Get notified of tools to update. Wait for them to download. Quit Watson, and then launch it again.

This has generated many complaints and requests to improve things. Until now, I had thought that there wasn't a workaround -- Cocoa doesn't allow you to "unload" a plugin once it has been loaded, so you have to re-launch to get the new plugins recognized by Watson. Well, it turns out that there are ways to detect the version of a plugin without actually loading it. For the technically inclined readers, it's using CFBundle in place of NSBundle to do the checking part.

This means that a forthcoming version of Watson will not require relaunching. I think I will include a preference to allow the updates to come through without notification, so that you can avoid even being aware that an update has taken place, as long as you are on a reasonably fast connection.