News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

April 17, 2007

geekery

Disk image installation etiquette

Posted Apr. 17, ’07, 6:32 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Geekery

Mounted Disk Image Most experienced Mac users know exactly what to do when they encounter a piece of software that is distributed on a .dmg aka disk image file. You open it up to mount it as a virtual disk, drag the application to your Applications folder (or elsewhere if you’re saucy). For those in the know, it’s neat and easy.

That said, it’s not terribly intuitive for many users. Macworld’s forums are filled with question after question asking about why “a white disk mounts every time I open Firefox”. For many, years of Setup.exe files have trained computer users to double click whatever is downloaded and expect that to install the software. Therefore, double clicking the disk image is the installation.

Some developers work around this problem by using the traditional Read Me First file or by making the background image of the disk image instructions detailing dragging the application into the Applications folder (sometimes complete with a symbolic link to it to drag to). That’s still putting a lot of trust in the user though.

noodlesoft has a different idea. He suggests that applications should attempt to determine if they are being launched from a disk image (he suggests a read-only mountable partition is a good tell). If they detect it to be so, prompt the user to install. At this point the application can copy itself to the Applications directory, then restart itself off the hard drive (conceivably it could also unmount the disk image). No fuss, no muss. It sounds like a brilliant idea to me that will not only prevent the problem but slowly through repeated “Should I install myself?” dialogs, educate the user about what he should be doing to begin with.

[via David Paul Robinson]


8 Comments

Brian said:

Brilliant. Would keep me from having to constantly remove .DMG files from my Dad's Cube.

April 17, 2007 7:52 AM
DanH said:

I don't understand how people can use computers without figuring out stuff like this. It's really much simpler than the windows paradigm. Drag and drop. But yes, I have an uncle who would have like ten dmg's at a time mounted so he could run the programs in them. I guess the solution is to alienate people even further from the technology they depend on.

April 17, 2007 9:13 AM
Mark said:

Only downside I see is the ability to somewhat limit the range of a program you are testing to determine whether or not to install, but of course that is not foolproof since programs running from an image often go about happily playing about in the library.

April 17, 2007 9:17 AM
Donn said:

I'm mostly fine with this concept so long as it still requires an administrator's password to install into Applications.

The potential downside is feature creep in the installation process, such as the option to install elsewhere. While handy, it starts to feel like a Windows installation wizard; drag and drop is much more elegant.

April 17, 2007 9:44 AM
jayH said:

hmmm wouldn't that make it possible to malicious software to install themselves into our hard drives?

it took me a while, but i figure what the .dmg files were and how to prevent them from opening the ejectable thingy from my founder lol so i think most users will too?

April 17, 2007 9:56 AM
Dave said:

The downside I see is environments that serve applications by sharing directories read-only. If I have a lab of computers (or simply a household with 2 or more machines), it is easier to keep one installation up to date than one per machine. Can Airport Disks be shared in such a manner (read-only)?

Seems to me that you don't need the disk image. Can't you just compress the application? I guess that gets you a lot of zip files instead of disk images, but you have the application on your system instead of inside a dmg. If a user ends up with a download directory (or desktop) full of applications, s/he can simply move them to the Applications directory. I think Windows has seriously damaged expectations if users think they can't simply drag an application to the Applications directory.

This is, of course, why the default setting on Safari is to automatically open disk images and install the application. Clearly we need a better system than that.

April 17, 2007 11:15 AM
Adam said:

after years of using a PC, i absolutly love how simple it is to just drag the app into the app folder.

I agree DanH, I don't see how people can use computers and not understand this stuff.

Everyonce in awhile I think about getting my mom a mac, but I soon realize that she would never actually quit a program and would have tons of DMGs on her desktop.

April 17, 2007 11:34 AM
iPodtouch said:

Even if the DMG did automatically install, the user would still be left with the original compressed file. This would mean that a computer illiterate person would still open the compressed file each time, thinking that it was the real application, thus creating another problem.

April 17, 2007 10:27 PM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: