The App Store ones were a simple matter of logging in with my Apple account and reinstalling (this included Dash, mentioned here). The other tools meant hunting around for installers, realising that most of the installers now were several versions ahead of the ones I used, in many cases breaking my music projects. It also meant trawling through 9 years of emails to find licence file attachments and serials numbers so I could re-register the applications, or try and purchase upgrades for those where I couldn't find an installer with the same version as I had bought.
Giant PITA. For once I was glad that App Store apps were all auto updated through the time I had them, and I didn't have to bother with activation codes etc. In fact, I ended up trashing the fresh install idea and migrated my old machine to the new. I was actually easier to put up with old junk apps I didn't use anymore than to try and manually install just the ones I needed.
NB: A lot of my audio software is licenced via an iLok device. Whilst I HATED the idea of a 'dongle' like an iLok before, this hardware upgrade has made me appreciate the fact that I didn't have to worry about re-licencing all of my audio production software the used the iLok either.
`brew cask install $APP`
> ...to find licence file attachments and serials numbers
Store these in 1Password (other password managers are available)
Your point about versioning is a good one though. A lot of sites don't make it easy to find older versions of their software and I don't think package managers like homebrew support versioning (although I could be wrong).
.app bundles are great, just not a complete solution.
Sparkle is the de-facto standard used by almost all apps.
>no standard uninstall mechanism
Deleting the .app file would do that for most apps. The config files might be handy to keep around if you re-install (and are inert anyway), else it's pretty easy to remove those too. It would be nice for the OS to be able to track "all files installed by an app" though in case those are installed by an installer (and thus, are not self-contained in the .app folder).
>and going from "I have this .dmg/.zip file in my downloads folder" to "I'm running this app from my Applications folder and don't have any leftovers in my downloads folder" is several non-obvious steps.
It's a few steps, but its still as obvious as things get in computing. If users can't manage that, how they'd manage USING the app?
There's a reason so many downloads include a custom background image with a big "DRAG ME TO THE APPLICATIONS FOLDER" message and an arrow pointed to a /Applications alias. This is such a common use case that I don't understand why Apple didn't just make a "This disk image is an installer" flag, and automatically prompt the user with "Do you want to install this to the Applications folder?"
Perhaps, but they just need to be told once what to do, and it's dead easy. Having an installer is not that more intuitive -- they'd still have to be shown how to use their first one.
>This is such a common use case that I don't understand why Apple didn't just make a "This disk image is an installer" flag, and automatically prompt the user with "Do you want to install this to the Applications folder?"
Yeah, some apps do it automatically when opened from the DMG.
The reason it's a problem now is that screwing it up is easier than doing it right, and unless the DMG's author manually added it, there's not even a hint that you should do something other than open the image and run it from there.
IMO the "some apps do it automatically" is even worse because it's inconsistent. Some apps will do it automatically and teach you that it's the way to get things installed, and then the rest of your apps won't. If checking on run and offering to move is the solution, it ought to be standardized systemwide so that users can (correctly) learn to expect it.
Is there anything particularly wrong with doing this? I know that it's not the typical use scenario, but it doesn't seem like it causes any problems, and it's dead easy even for people for whom the correct procedure is hard.
So mush nostalgia.
This is a sort of question that makes me hate windows. Do you want to browse files or play music? Do you want to uninstall program? Do you want to change that setting? You have unused icons, so I decided to install updates now, you can't stop me. Oh, come on!
For a more Mac-like method, make it a special Finder mode where instead of showing the directory contents, installer DMGs display a big icon of the app with an Install button under it.
If you really want to get at the files directly, right clicking in the DMG could give a "Show disk image contents" item similar to how app packages are handled. Right clicking on the big application icon would include an "Open" item to circumvent installation and execute from the disk image.
Just like the App Store, but without the App Store.
> making your computer limited to a whim of someone on the other side of the world
That's a really weird way to say this. Security is not a whim.
You're right, just ditch whole damned sandbox thing because a few tools won't work.
Or in an ideal world where we didn't have to decide between one extreme or the other, we could sandbox everything that doesn't have a problem with it, reserving the exceptions for those few tools that don't get along well with a sandbox. (Vetting the hell out of those non-sandbox apps, of course, because we don't want to "<make our computer> limited to the whim of someone on the other side of the world" which in this case wouldn't be Apple.)