[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2006/06/01]
On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Patrick Carr wrote: > P.S. Including a soft link to /Applications/ in the disk image is less > hateful but not optimal. Lots of people (foolishly) remove Applications from the side bar, or turn off the side bar altogether. Putting the link there fixes this. Lots of people (tremendously foolishly) don't Grok disk images, and just download the .dmg to the desktop, mount it, launch the application in it (Firefox, etc), then are mystified that [a] they can't delete the .dmg (if they're the fastidious type that prefers to delete the .dmg, which most aren't, but those that do try are stymied), [b] the computer says there's a disk inserted but they don't remember putting one in the CD drive and the system won't let them eject it anyway, and [c] every time they click the Firefox (or whatever) dock icon, this other window pops up and then that disk they can't find reappears. It's all terribly confusing, but apparently that's how Macs work, so they live with it. From first-hand observation, the first item above (pruned or absent sidebars) applies to a significant minority of the Mac userbase, and the second (just running things from the .dmg) could apply to the majority. Eliminate the alpha-geek subset of Mac users, leaving the Limewire-using college students and the AOL-using retirees, and I'm fairly sure that such behavior *is* how the majority do things. Draw whatever conclusions from this that you like, but it seems to me that there is some kind of UI breakdown going on here. As much as the alpha geeks may be impressed by the "just drag from the .dmg to the Applications folder" "simplicity", maybe there's something to be said for a package installer that puts things away properly and -- hell why not -- moves itself from the desktop to the trash on successful installation, avoiding leaving downloaded turdpiles in its wake that will never ever get deleted "because it seemed to be important". As for putting an image behind the icon in the .dmg window, meh. It's an innocuous chance to have some branding for the developer, sometimes it's actually kinda cute (cf. Delicious Library), and other times it's actually useful (cf. Yojimbo). It's a tool, and it can be used well, just as it can be used badly -- just like most other tools. -- Chris Devers
Generated at 05:00 on 04 Jun 2006 by mariachi 0.52