[Adium-devl] The disk image

[Peter Hosey]

On the MacSB mailing list today, there was a thread about pricing in  
which a developer asked for feedback about his product and his  
website. I came up with a number of criticisms, of which one was:

> Strike 1: Thou shalt not write an application that can't be run  
> from a disk image. This is probably half personal-taste, but if I  
> can't use your application from the disk image, you have already lost.

This started a huge thread about disk images and zips and tbzs and  
thingies that has mostly died out, but was quite a flurry until then.

Chris Clark said:

> On 09/11/2006, at 6:35 PM, leenoori wrote:
>> Four reasons for using disk images:
>>
>> 1. Apple told us to (and still distributes some of its own  
>> software via disk image)
>
> Agreed, this is a fairly good reason. But the official line is to  
> distribute in Internet-Enabled disk images, which tends to  
> invalidate #3 on the list (which already has issues that I'll come  
> to).

And I said:

> True, but I disagree with it and I don't think anybody actually  
> does it. I, for one, like regular disk images better.
>
> “Internet-enabled” disk images are:
> ⁃ by design, not much different from a zip or tbz or tgz (which is  
> a downside IMO)
> ⁃ harder to create (you have to do “hdiutil internet-enable  
> foo.dmg” after creating it)
> ⁃ no smaller than regular disk images.
>
> I see no reason to head down this road.

In response to that thread, our Chris posted to the blog:

	http://adiumx.com/blog/2006/11/is-dmg-confusing.php

We have twelve comments on that so far, but myself and Chris were  
both impressed by this one:

> You could of course just set the "internet-enabled" bit on a .dmg  
> if it contains only one file (just the App, no documentation etc.).  
> Then Safari takes care of downloading, expanding and deleting  
> the .dmg, the user ends up with the application on the desktop.

I hadn't really thought of the just-one-file thing before.

Currently, we have ten tons of crap in our makefile for positioning  
the icon Just So, and setting a background, and adding a symlink to / 
Applications, blah blah blah. We could eliminate all of that,  
replacing it with:

	hdiutil internet-enable Adium.dmg

Then, as the commenter notes, Safari would expand the only item  
(Adium.app) to the desktop, then auto-Trash the dmg. Result: Adium on  
the user's desktop, ready for him to install anywhere he wants it. No  
muss, no fuss, for 90% of users (I know I want to keep the dmg, but I  
doubt I'm in the majority).

I *like* this idea.

What do you think?
________________________________
\ Peter Hosey / prh at boredzo.org
PGP public key ID: 7AB26BAD (since 2006-01-01)

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