Automatically Downloading App Updates in iTunes

Question

iTunes has a lot of annoyances. My biggest pet peeve is the series of manual steps you have to go through to download app updates and then sync them to iPhone/iPad:

1. Click the "Apps" button in the sidebar
2. Click the (really tiny) "Updates available" button
3. Click the "Download All Free Updates" button
4. Wait for everything to download
5. Sync the device

Is there a faster way to do this? Has anyone written an Applescript for it (I've googled, but can't find anything)?

I know it is faster/easier to just download updates on the device itself, rather than going through iTunes, but since I have four devices, I'd rather just download once and sync to the devices than have each device do its own downloads.