>I use InstallShield to package my Palm application
>and yesterday downloaded & tried "Wise" - I heard
>about it in this list. My InstallShield executable
>was 1,212K and the Wise executable is 580K! And
>it also runs faster than InstallShield. Did anyone
>else notice this?. I was using "InstallShield Express"
>- is that why it made a huge executable? In both cases
>I was using the maximum compression option.
We use the full-blown Installshield. It's a *pig* as far as download space
goes. The binaries for our app take up maybe 4MB. The distributable is
12MB (the way we distribute it, we needed to break it up into 3 separate
installs, so we have three times the overhead. Ugh.) In addition, version
5.0 came out with a bug that broke our installation. It wasn't fixed in
5.1, and we had to upgrade to the next version (5.5) at a hefty fee to get
this bug fixed. Talk about a lousy company.
If you're needing a simple, no-fancy stuff kind of install, you might be
interested in something I found a while back called "INF-tool". It's
available at http://inner-smile.com , and it's cheap. ($39 for a
single-user license.) (I don't work with or for this guy in any way, I just
like the idea of an amazingly tiny install.)
This creates a 2-4K .inf script to do the install, and has a 20K or so
binary to call it. When you make your install, it compressses everything
into a single self-extracting file so it's easy to distribute and is tiny.
If you need to do fancy things, you can set up your code in a .dll to do
anything extra. A little harder to code than IS, but orders of magnitude
smaller.
Cheers,
-Ken
