[Adium-devl] Let's abandon disk images

[Peter Hosey]

On Mar 29, 2007, at 17:34:48, Michael Dippery wrote:
> I've also lost count of the number of times friends and colleagues  
> have frantically asked me, "Oh my God, why isn't Firefox/Adium/ 
> whatever not launching when I click it's Dock icon!" Most of the  
> time, it's because the user has ejected (and often times trashed)  
> the disk image.

Always trashed, at least on recent OSs.

Since Panther or Tiger (I forgot which), disk images mount  
automatically when you open an alias to something on a disk image (as  
long as you still have the disk image file, of course). So even if  
they eject the disk image, it'll come right back when they click (or  
double-click *cough*) the Dock tile.

> The biggest thing I don't like about using a {bzip2, gzip}- 
> compressed tarball is that users tend to decompress them and then  
> leave the application file hanging around their desktop...but I  
> guess if users want to be messy then that's their right. :)

Yeah, and at least they can use the app.

> To be honest, up until recently, I was a big fan of distributing  
> software via dmg files.

Same here. I defended them quite vigorously on the MacSB mailing  
list, and I have a pair of blog posts that, taken together, make the  
case for them:

	<http://boredzo.org/blog/archives/2006-01-15/compression-and-archive- 
formats-a-description>
	<http://boredzo.org/blog/archives/2006-01-16/how-to-distribute-your- 
software>

But:

> Then I took a step back and really thought about it, and realized  
> that maybe there really ARE usability problems with the format.

Exactly. It's become clear to me over the past few weeks that users  
(especially the kind of non-computer-expert users Adium has) do not  
understand disk images. And unless Apple includes a video or pamphlet  
with every new Mac showing how to work with them, the only solution  
for us is to abandon them.
___________________________________
\ Peter Hosey / boredzo at adiumx.com
PGP public key ID: C6550423 (since 2007-01-01)


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