On 6/1/06, Chris Devers <[email protected]> wrote:
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".
Another major benefit of installers - on Windows, anyway - is that after the app is installed it is then linked from the standard place you go to when running an app, the relatively-easy-to-find "Start" button in the corner of the screen. Now, I'm certainly not going to claim that the Start button isn't hateful in a myriad other ways (in particular the way you have to run your mouse pointer along the expanding tree of programs without falling off, much like those old fairground games with the twisted wire you had to navigate with the little electrified hoop without touching it) but at least the "Programs" menu is considerably easier to get to than the "Applications" folder on OS X. As for the problem of shit getting installed all over your system: that's not a problem with installers, it's with leaky abstractions. -- Yoz
