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There's a perfectly good system wide Installer on the Mac, but nobody uses it unless they have to, because installers suck (they ask, among other things, which

There's a perfectly good system wide Installer on the Mac, but nobody uses it unless they have to, because installers suck (they ask, among other things, which drive you'd like to install the software to -- what normal user knows the answer to that question?). It didn't help that PackageMaker used to be one of the oddest, most incomprehensible pieces of software you ever had the misfortune to use. It's a bit better now, but most developers I know have sworn off it for good. Apple does have a technology called "Internet-Enabled DMGs", which automatically mounts, copies the application, then unmounts and deletes the dmg. It's not widely known about or used.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
That's sounds like the feature that was needed. The software I've had to suffer under, had me do that by hand. No, drag-and-drop is NOT unintuitive, and if that was all that it took then great. But Mac guys are so used to the ringamarole that they forget this part: "Oh yeah, then mount the dmg, then open the virtual drive, then drag one of the various icons (which one???) to your Applications folder, oh yeah open that first in the finder, then close the virtual drive and unmount the dmg, then find the downloaded wad (what was it called again?) and delete it." All of those operations accessed from different menus/tools.
- jsolson 16y ago
  A few things used to make this process a little less painful. First, Safari used to download things to the desktop. This meant the DMG file was sitting right there, looking ugly, taking up space. Second, Safari used to, by default, open "Safe" attachments (which included disk images), and open the Finder window to the newly mounted image automatically. The upshot was that, assuming the developer had made an effort to indicate what to drag where with a big honkin' arrow, after your download was done there would be a pretty clear sign of what to drag where to install the app. Unmounting an deleting the DMG has always been an issue (and the internet-enabled DMGs are better for this), although only the unmounting bit is unique to OS X. Under Windows you're still going to have an installer file lying about that has to be deleted. Both of these things went away, though, and many developers haven't caught up with the times.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago

That's sounds like the feature that was needed. The software I've had to suffer under, had me do that by hand. No, drag-and-drop is NOT unintuitive, and if that was all that it took then great. But Mac guys are so used to the ringamarole that they forget this part: "Oh yeah, then mount the dmg, then open the virtual drive, then drag one of the various icons (which one???) to your Applications folder, oh yeah open that first in the finder, then close the virtual drive and unmount the dmg, then find the downloaded wad (what was it called again?) and delete it." All of those operations accessed from different menus/tools.

jsolson 16y ago
A few things used to make this process a little less painful. First, Safari used to download things to the desktop. This meant the DMG file was sitting right there, looking ugly, taking up space. Second, Safari used to, by default, open "Safe" attachments (which included disk images), and open the Finder window to the newly mounted image automatically. The upshot was that, assuming the developer had made an effort to indicate what to drag where with a big honkin' arrow, after your download was done there would be a pretty clear sign of what to drag where to install the app. Unmounting an deleting the DMG has always been an issue (and the internet-enabled DMGs are better for this), although only the unmounting bit is unique to OS X. Under Windows you're still going to have an installer file lying about that has to be deleted. Both of these things went away, though, and many developers haven't caught up with the times.