Improving the Mac Installation Process

November 28, 2008 by Sam McDonald

About three years ago I bought my first mac. I remember downloading my first third-party application. Once it downloaded, I was greeted with something that looked a lot like this:

So, what did I do? I double clicked the program icon, and the program launched. Even though the program launched and was working, there where a few things that bothered me. First what was that DMG thing? Where does my program go, when I eject the DMG? So, I ended up dragging the application to my Applications folder, and all of my worries disappeared.

Although this process felt a bit awkward, I didn’t let it bother me. It was much better than what I was used to on windows, and it gave me a great sense of control, so I stopped worrying about the awkwardness and continued to install all kinds of third party applications on my mac.

I didn’t think twice about the install process, until I downloaded a Dashboard Widget. Once downloaded, I was greeted with this:

Once install is clicked the strange file that I downloaded disappears into nothingness and I end up with dashboard widget perfectly installed to the proper place. So, why can’t my third party application be installed that easily?

So, here is the part where I blame apple because obviously it is their problem. But the more I think about it, every apple application I have ever installed has used an installer. Some third party applications do the same, but it has become common practice that if you don’t need an installer, you shouldn’t use it.

I then realized that, as third party developers, we really have all the tools we need to to change this install process. It would be quite simple to create and an application that could run from a DMG to move a third party application to your applications folder. So, in the end, this has become one more project on the “to do” list for me.