@Paul: In Presence, release notes display after you've been informed of and have installed an update. To me it seems more sensible to say "here are the new features you've just installed - go and try them out" rather than "here are the new features - commit them to memory while you download and install the update, then go and try them out (if you haven't forgotten what they are by then)".

I guess what Sparkle-style update notifications are really saying is "here are the new features - please install this update". This perceived need to motivate the user makes sense to me if you're trying to sell them a paid major upgrade, but less so for free updates. Updates contain new features and/or bug fixes - why *wouldn't* you want those?

But then, Presence is a bit different to self-contained apps - with multiple components communicating (Mac, iOS, central server) it has more need for you to stay up to date. Free upgrades aren't really considered optional - if you persist with ignoring updates, eventually the version you have is considered too old and stops working.

What really precipitated this though was that I wasn't using Sparkle (and there were technical reasons for that), so I needed somewhere for release notes. The news mechanism - which I wanted anyway - was the obvious place.