Re: How Create Installer for a Cocoa Application
Re: How Create Installer for a Cocoa Application
- Subject: Re: How Create Installer for a Cocoa Application
- From: Todd Yandell <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 23:15:58 -0600
Hi,
One of my "pet peeves" is to download a brand new application,
uncompress it, and discover it's using some sort of non-standard
installer. Photoshop, Illustrator, FreeHand, and all of Macromedia's
applications are a good example of a bad installer.
Unless you really need to copy kernel extensions and files into
'/Library', you should avoid using an installer. Almost every Mac OS X
application is installed using a method that's commonly called
"drag-and-drop installation". That is, the user simply downloads a Disk
Image file, mounts it, and drags the application into their
Applications folder. There's no need to run an installer, type in an
Administrator password, or do anything out of the ordinary.
For an example of this, try downloading one of OmniGroup's
(www.omnigroup.com) applications. Once it's through downloading,
double-click the resulting '.dmg' file. It will automatically mount and
open up the folder, and from there you're given the instructions to
simply drag the application to your Applications folder.
If possible, you should always use this mechanism. The Disk Utility
(look under '/Applications/Utilities/') provides a means for you to
create '.dmg' files, and the rest is pretty straightforward. If you
need some help getting this to work, I believe CocoaDev
(www.cocoadev.com) has a tutorial on it.
However, if you do need to install some important files outside of your
Application's bundle, you should use the PackageMaker utility that's
included with the developer tools. It allows you to create standard
Mac-like installers that include all of the features you will need. The
documentation included with this utility goes into all of the details.
Hope that helps!
— Todd Yandell
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