Re: mac disk image images

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From: Chris Devers
Subject: Re: mac disk image images
Date: 23:24 on 01 Jun 2006
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

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