Re: Installer UI advices

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 7:08 Uhr -0600 15.03.2005, Jesse Ross wrote:
> I think the confusion here for end users is that the volume that 
> comes from the DMG looks just like an external hard drive, and even 
> has to be "ejected" like an external hard drive, when it's certainly 
> not something physical they can eject. Make DMG volumes look more 
> like packages, and allow the user to throw them in the trash when 
> they are done with them, just as with a PKG, and you solve the 
> consistency issues. From a technical point of view, it can be 
> handled exactly as it is now -- it's the visual metaphors that need 
> to change.

 Why bother? ZIP archives already behave in that way. What I'm trying 
to get across is that it would be much less work to just use 
archives. We'd get the same features, and there would be no special 
code needed to hide what they are, while we'd also get all the same 
features as far as the users are concerned.

 Remember, .DMGs came up in the MacOS 10.0 days, when it couldn't 
create ZIP archives. Since disk images were already implemented, 
people used those to package their apps (StuffIt hadn't been updated 
to handle long or Unicode filenames and had some other bugs back 
then, and I think it also had some issues when used to extract other 
types of archives).

 Then Omni Group found out you could set up a Finder background image 
for folder windows on a disk image and write your instructions on it, 
and it became a packaging standard because it supported all features, 
*and* promised that particular usability and coolness improvement.

 In 10.3 MacOS got ZIP archive support, but it was implemented 
differently than StuffIt had used it, and were thus incompatible. So, 
it's only natural that apps that have to ship for earlier MacOS 
versions or that want those special background images are still 
distributed as .DMGs.

> A user shouldn't look at his desktop/file manager/wherever his 
> drives are contained, and see this non-physical physical looking 
> volume. It's a very confusing concept to teach a new user. That, and 
> having to Command-E a non-physical volume when I know that it's a 
> file I want to delete (Command-Delete), is strange and still trips 
> me up when I'm in work mode and not thinking about it.

 Exactly. And Steve Krug has told all of us in his book why we don't 
want to trip up users, even if it's only momentarily. They want to 
get work done. People use computers to literally do rocket science. 
We don't want to lower their effectiveness by making them use 
precious brain capacity to remember quirks in the app if we can 
easily fix it.

 Using archives instead of disk images *would* fix it. Having to 
delete the archive afterward isn't different from having to delete 
the image file in amount of manual labor involved. But it's less 
thinking, because files and how to manipulate them is something they 
have already learned.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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