site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev@lists.apple.com User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421) ... Or worse. /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/ -- Paul Miller | paul@fxtech.com | www.fxtech.com | Got Tivo? _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a... 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: 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 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. :-( This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com