Thanks for your feedback steelhouse.
I thought I would try to answer your questions, together with other ones I have been asked such as:
"Where are the private keys stored ?",
by describing what MultiBit is actually doing.


A day in the life of MultiBit:

1. When you install MultiBit, is comes with a recent blockchain. This is about half the install download.

2. You start up MultiBit and it connects to bitcoin full nodes - i.e. nodes running bitcoind - in the normal peer-to-peer fashion. (You can also configure it to connect to a specific node if you want.)

3. MultiBit loads from disk the user's wallet file. The user's private keys are stored in the wallet.

4. MultiBit starts downloading new blocks from the peers. These are exactly the same blocks as you see on, say, blockexplorer.com.

5. It passes the new blocks to the wallet and says to it:
"Have a look at these new blocks and see if there are any transactions of interest to you."

6. The wallet looks through the new blocks' transactions and stores (in the wallet) the transactions that either send it bitcoin or that confirm its previous spends.

7. MultiBit stores the headers only of the new blocks into its local copy of the blockchain,   It does not store the transactions themselves. This is the main reason the MultiBit blockchain is so much smaller than the bitcoind blockchain.

8. MultiBit then waits for new blocks to appear from the peers and repeats.

I hope this answers your questions but if anything is not clear just ask.

Yes - I think having a 'cross-rate' as per giszmo's suggestion would help usability.

For the early adopter 'bitcoiners' I think they are happy to think in terms of bitcoins but for wider adoption being able to present the info in  a fiat currency would make it easier.  

I will put it on the feature request list in the github wiki.   A single cross-rate where you switch the presentation of all figures (like on a website when you switch from, say, US dollars to euros) would probably be the way to go.   I like giszmo's suggestion of a 'rate-out-of-date' colour scheme too.

brandondayton <- Glad you are enjoying multibit !

:-)

Edit: Idea has been put into wiki: https://github.com/jim618/multibit/wiki/Cross-rates

Gone into the codebase today is the ability to create swatches with multiple lines in the label.
Here is an example:



Also, the label fields on the 'Receive Bitcoin' and 'Send Bitcoin' screens have been made correspondingly bigger.

Thanks genjix!

Lots of good improvement suggestions on that page - I have bookmarked it for future reference.

Similiarly I am looking forward to the rollout of libbitcoin.  Once devs have a more structured C++ codebase to work with there should be some really interesting solutions appearing.

Hi GoWest,
Thanks to Bitcoins for Christmas for the recommendation.
That is a great idea for the Christmas season - I think I will use it myself.

 :-)

I have tidied up the 'Send Bitcoin' screen so that it now also generates swatches.

Here is a screenshot:



Also, I have added a 'Paste' button into the send 'swatch panel' so that you can paste a text bitcoin URI or swatch directly and it will fill out the send form.

In the very bottom left of the screen you can see that the 'Online' label now also has the block height as a tooltip.

I am hoping to get another beta out early next week, all being well.

An issue encountered by someone trying to install MultiBit after receiving a gift from BitcoinsForChristmas:

"Problem: when I launch Multibit it doesn't open - rather, my Nokia App store launches. Even when I launch the JAR file in the Multibit directory."

If you need more details screenshots, I can try to get them for you.

I just installed Multibit (on XP), but when I click on its shortcut it starts Ovi (a Nokia application to manage my smartphone).
The same happens if I click on the Multibit executable or its uninstaller.
Any clue?

Many thanks Jim,
I just ran the following .reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jar]
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.jar]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.jar]

as indicated on the second page you found, and it fixed everything. So now I can run Multibit.

Thanks again.