On Jun 1, 2006, at 6:24 PM, Chris Devers wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Patrick Carr wrote:
P.S. Including a soft link to /Applications/ in the disk image is
less
hateful but not optimal.
Lots of people (foolishly) remove Applications from the side bar, or
turn off the side bar altogether. Putting the link there fixes this.
Unless, of course, I choose to install it elsewhere. But if I'm
installing it elsewhere, presumably I have some clue. Hence the
qualification.
Lots of people (tremendously foolishly) don't Grok disk images, and
just
download the .dmg to the desktop, mount it, launch the application
in it
(Firefox, etc), then are mystified that [a] they can't delete the .dmg
(if they're the fastidious type that prefers to delete the .dmg, which
most aren't, but those that do try are stymied), [b] the computer says
there's a disk inserted but they don't remember putting one in the CD
drive and the system won't let them eject it anyway, and [c] every
time
they click the Firefox (or whatever) dock icon, this other window pops
up and then that disk they can't find reappears. It's all terribly
confusing, but apparently that's how Macs work, so they live with it.
I would contend that taking away the sidebar takes away the visual of
the mounted disk image and makes it less obvious that it's not some
magical "application launching window" that they're supposed to keep.
Tangential point: Assuming all of your users are the most complete
idiots imaginable is hateful for the rest. Why, for example, won't my
bank email my online transaction receipts encrypted, especially since
they xxxx out different quads in the credit card number than the
merchants? (Seriously, if you had both a receipt and an email from
the bank, you're down to guessing 4 digits. Of course, it's clearly
easier just to steal the data from the bank or the government. But I
digress.) Because people can't handle encrypted email, of course, so
we won't even make it an option.
Given the choice in application package management between "drag this
to somewhere on your disk; it's self contained and upgrading involves
dragging a new one" and "this installer will run and crap who knows
where on your disk in directories that might have been on our system
(why hello, /opt/intel/) and you won't know where because all you see
is a spinning candy cane," I'll take the former. As an aside, I'd say
well over 75% of the installer packages I've used on OS X ask for the
administrator password, seemingly whether they need it or not.
Where that package ends up going doesn't matter so much to me. A good
indexing search can obsolete a complicated physical hierarchy (see
gmail) and so it is with something like quicksilver (hate for the GTD
crowd aside). I agree that it's hateful that Apple doesn't keep the
binaries it updates separate, but that hasn't affected me (admittedly
I don't administer hundreds of macs).
Pat
