Re: how a single product will install to different locations
Re: how a single product will install to different locations
- Subject: Re: how a single product will install to different locations
- From: Paul Miller <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:18:49 -0500
Bill Coderre wrote:
On Jul 1, 2008, at 11:06 AM, Sandeep Dhama wrote:
I need to create a installer in which a single product will support
many choices for where it should be installed. For example i have a
adobe after effects that will install multiple destination locations.
I have created a installer plugin that will ask different
destination locations from user at the time of installation. But i do
not know how to install the product to these different destination
location. So please tell me how to do this?.
Here is one way to do it, BUT it's ugly, and could have security issues,
and I hope there's a better way to do it:
...
Or worse.
That's one reason why this is a bad idea. The other is that you're
ignoring the usual Mac user experience conventions for installation. Mac
users don't expect installation to be a huge ordeal involving many many
choices.
I'm a plugin developer too, and unfortunately, the sad reality is that
plugin installation for Adobe Photoshop (and other hosts) is our #1
customer support issue. Customers generally have several versions of
Photoshop or After Effects or whatever installed, and the plugin
locations of these products is usually something like
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/
A "simple" Mac installer just doesn't know enough to help the user
install their plugin into that path, since we can't easily find out
which Adobe products (or versions) they may have installed.
(Not only Mac -- my pal Robert Reimann and his mentor Alan Cooper
formulated a bunch of design principles, such as "Considerate products
don't burden you with their problems" and "Considerate products don't
ask a lot of questions" and "Considerate products use common sense."
There's also the meta-principle, "Decide who your target audience is
(hopefully 90% of your users), and design for them."
Unfortunately, without a completely insane amount of work or writing
custom installer plugins or even a custom installer (as Adobe did),
we're literally *forced* to ask the user something they may not
necessarily know, or forget to change with the "Choose Location" button.
This is probably why I see this question asked almost once a week. I
asked it myself a few months back.
In your case: Why should you burden all of your users with customization
questions if most of them just want the defaults?
So, perhaps a better question is, "what exactly do you want your
installer to accomplish, overall?" You've posted a whole bunch of
questions recently, all of them are obviously trying to accomplish one
bigger goal, what is that?
I think his question was the same as mine. How do we do the work for the
user and find these plugin install locations and present a menu
(after-all, the user could have 4 or more copies of Photoshop installed)
rather than assume the user even knows where to install the stuff?
On Windows, this is a relatively trivial thing with most installer
tools. Or, we can easily search out the latest version of Photoshop
(that we know about) and default the install location to that. I still
can't even do something as simple as that with installer scripts (at
least in pre-Leopard, but you know, we still have to support Tiger users
too!).
While we're on the subject, why don't you guys release Installer
upgrades to previous OS versions, so we can continue to use your latest
installer stuff and still support all supported platforms? Every time
there is a new OS X release, there's some new installer change, and oh,
none of them are backward compatible. Makes me want to just write my own
installer, and I'm probably not the only one. :-(
--
Paul Miller | email@hidden | www.fxtech.com | Got Tivo?
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