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Re: Installer UI advices
From: |
M. Uli Kusterer |
Subject: |
Re: Installer UI advices |
Date: |
Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:16:02 +0100 |
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
------------------------------------------------------------
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
- Re: Installer UI advices, (continued)
- Re: Installer UI advices, Markus Hitter, 2005/03/12
- Re: Installer UI advices, M. Uli Kusterer, 2005/03/14
- Re: Installer UI advices, Jesse Ross, 2005/03/14
- Re: Installer UI advices, M. Uli Kusterer, 2005/03/14
- Re: Installer UI advices, Quentin Mathé, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices, Markus Hitter, 2005/03/14
- Re: Installer UI advices, M. Uli Kusterer, 2005/03/14
- Re: Installer UI advices, Markus Hitter, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices, Graham J Lee, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices, Jesse Ross, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices,
M. Uli Kusterer <=
- Re: Installer UI advices, Quentin Mathé, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices, Jonathan Isom, 2005/03/14
- Re: Installer UI advices, M. Uli Kusterer, 2005/03/14
- Message not available
- Re: Installer UI advices, M. Uli Kusterer, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices, Quentin Mathé, 2005/03/15
- Re: Installer UI advices, Benoit, 2005/03/16
- Re: Installer UI advices, M. Uli Kusterer, 2005/03/16
- Re: Installer UI advices, Frederico Muñoz, 2005/03/16
- Re: Installer UI advices, Adrian Robert, 2005/03/16
- Re: Installer UI advices, Robert Slover, 2005/03/17