This is starting to stray a bit from Cocoa code talk, but as a bit of
feedback to all Cocoa developers out there who are developing
applications to ship to end-users (in contrast to internal corp apps),
the lack of uninstallers on Mac apps seems to be a notable omission,
for an otherwise stellar platform. I recently ran into a problem with
this with Final Cut Studio 2 on my MacBook Pro. For those unfamiliar
with FCS2, it takes a huge chunk of disk space to install video /
audio assets, which over time / other apps installed left me running
out of disk space. Apps like AppZapper don't find all the assets, and
when posts to Apple discussion forums net "reinstall OS X" as the best
advice for removing FCS2, there's definitely an opportunity there for
improvement. (FYI -- I did not reinstall OS X, I went on a Google /
file system hunt and eventually got most of it off, to the best of my
knowledge).
As a bit of user feedback to Cocoa app developers: if all things were
equal between two like apps I was evaluating, if one had an
uninstaller, it would tip the scales for me, and keep in mind, I'm a
software developer. Non-technical users are going to be all the more
-- if yours happens to be the app which results in them getting the
"reinstall OS X" advice, that is what the user is going to remember.
So in a nutshell, big +1 for uninstallers.
B
On Sep 10, 2008, at 7:32 AM, Bill Royds wrote:
On 10-Sep-08, at 04:59 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Anyway, if Mac software starts heading back down the road to
everything having an installer, the appeal of the Mac platform vs.
Windows will be severely diminished in my eyes. Drag and drop puts
the user in control - installers put the user at their mercy.
Whenever I see an installer that does nothing but put an app in /
Applications, I tend to think twice about using that app, because
it's often a sign of a poorly thought out product. Often I will
send an e-mail to the author complaining about this as well.
But you are not a typical user so your preferences are not the most
important.
Most users who want to install software only want to b able to click
on the downloaded package and have it install.It might ask some
questions like password or ask whether you want advanced control,
but even the concept of moving to /Applications is more than most
users want to know.
Windows installers are much easier for naive users to handle than
anything that requires knowledge of the system structure such as
drag and drop to /Applications.
Of course, it is still better to have a simple install logic and a
bundled app that you could drag and drop to /Applications is better
than one that requires many different steps. probably the double
click on an app package should just invoke a shell script the\at does
sudo cp MyApp.app /Applications
with the sudo password prompt in a gui window.
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