The average user uses Safari and has “Open Safe Files” turned on in this case, Safari will unpack the disk image just as if it were a tarball or zip archive. Won’t work the same way twice (when the user goes to unpack it the second time, it behaves as a perfectly normal disk image, with the attendant confusing UI) hard to create unpacks slowly Unpacks into a folder or bare application for the average user (Safari with “Open Safe Files” turned on) perfectly normal for everybody else This probably doesn’t matter anymore, since the Omni Group’s software-update statistics say that 98.4% of users are on Tiger (as of ), but if you still support users of earlier OS versions, you need to use zlib compression ( -format UDZO) instead. Your disk image won’t mount on any earlier version of the operating system your users will think it’s corrupt, since that’s what the error message suggests, and they’ll contact you with that assumption. One last point: bzip2 compression ( -format UDBZ) requires Tiger. And of course, you must tell the user the remedy (copy the app, then run the copy, then eject the disk image file and never mount it again). There can be no vacillation like in the Adium alert box (which vacillates because it’s caused by a simple permission failure, not an actual search for the disk image nature) it must be a statement, not a question. You’ll have to be careful with wording here, though-you need to be 100% sure that you’re running from a disk image, and write the alert text accordingly. Hmmmm.)Īnother solution is a runtime check whether the app is running from the disk image. (On the other hand, this provides a second reason for unilingual builds: One disk image per language, with both the background and the application localized in that language only. You’d have to pick one language, and hope that all your users know it, but anybody who doesn’t know the language you chose wouldn’t benefit from your nice obnoxiously big text. I suspect that users mistake the disk image window for a freshly-installed-folder window.Īnyway, one solution to the tunnel-vision problem would be a “DRAG THIS OVER HERE” message in a big font-but that’s no good, because you can’t have localized background images. I suspect that installers are partly to blame for that: I don’t know about Windows, but on Mac OS, installers would always open the folder containing the freshly-installed application, so that you could use it right away. Besides, the questions I hear from the users via the feedback list suggest that users see the disk image window and think the application is already installed-they aren’t looking for or expecting installation instructions, so your big arrow means nothing to them. The stories I heard from other developers suggest that people in general zero in on the application they want to use, without paying attention to anything else (e.g., arrows, help text, or symlinks). You may be thinking “well, just put a background image with an arrow to an Applications folder”. It was then that I realized that disk images are not as great for the average user as I had previously believed. This is only natural, because who would expect that a file is mounted, or that a file can be in use in another file? Users who encounter this message end up contacting us (usually asking “how do i uninstall it”). This occurs when the user tries to delete the disk image file without unmounting it first. The same non-obvious nature results in other problems: specifically, the error message “The operation cannot be completed because ‘SurfWriter-1.0.dmg’ is in use”. They don’t expect a file to act as a drive. I don’t know, either.)Īll this ultimately resulted from the fact that average users, including her, don’t recognize a disk image when they see it. She looked up the troubleshooting instructions in the Adium help (good), then critically misunderstood them (bad) with the result that she moved her Adium 2.0 folder out of the Application Support folder. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that she didn’t know what a disk image was, so she assumed that she was not running Adium from the disk image (I imagine she thought something like “surely I’d know what that was if I was using one”). Sandboxes the application: If it won’t work from the disk image, it probably sucksĬonfuses the average user they typically run the application from the disk image, then encounter problems when they try to delete the image file or (much later) run a Sparkle updateīack in March, an Adium user had a problem trying to perform the Sparkle update.
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