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http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=54917
------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Oct 4 14:02:56 -0700
2005 -------
Exactly!!!
Most Windows users *DO* use MS Office. Most PC users use Windows. This is the
current PC landscape, period (will Vista and DRM change that???). The UI
designers of OOo 2.0 definitely had this in mind because the UI
improvements/integration on Windows are amazing! I have been using and
spreading the word about OOo since the SO 5.2 days. This is the first release,
however, that not only works as well as MS office, but also looks as good as
well (no longer the ugly duckling)!
For all of the effort that has been poured into OOo to make it on par (or
better) with the finest products on the market, none of it matters if the
installation process sucks! The most important part of spreading OOo is making
sure that it is at least as easy (if not easier) to install than MS Office. The
installer is the very first thing a user will see, and they may not give OOo a
fair shake if they dislike the installation process.
Just look, for instance, at two popular tax applications (in the US) - Quicken
TurboTax and Kiplingers TaxCut. Both apps do almost the same thing, in almost
the same way. For years, Quicken TurboTax was the defacto standard - that is,
until Quicken started installing all kinds of other junk that the user did not
want and requiring product activation. All of a sudden, Quicken TurboTax lost
huge market share, and the previously hard to find TaxCut was available
everywhere...
The installer must be brain-dead simple!!! There is a reason why almost every
other Windows application installs the way they do - its what the users expect.
Users definitely will not expect install packages to be extracted to their
Desktop (who actually thought that was a good idea?). If preserving the repair
option is so important, the installer files should be stored in a separate
directory under OOo - not in a location where they are likely to be deleted, and
will anger most users ("What is this junk that OOo put on my Desktop???").
I guess the most disappointing part of all of this for me is the fact that OOo
now has a beautiful InstallShield style .msi installer that resembles every
other installer out there and really looks professional - but its wrapped up
into a single file mess!
If preserving the installer package on the PC is absolutely a must (why?),
change the NSIS script to just copy the installer package to the OOo directory
(ex. C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org\Install). Do not prompt the user for a
path - the main installer only requests a path when performing a Custom install!
A nice thing to do would be to replace the screen that requests a path with a
screen with a check box that allows users to automatically remove the extra ~80
MB of installer files (with a caveat) at the completion of an install.
Another really cool feature that the NSIS installer could have is the ability to
check for a JAVA Runtime, and download and install one on demand (maybe this
already exists - I always install JAVA first...). Abiwords plugins installer
(also NSIS) works this way - it downloads what you need as you install. This
way, a user could install the current JAVA as part of the OOo installation (if
they choose to), and the installation process would be simpler and more
transparent to the user.
Thanks!
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