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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I think the most confusing concept in this process for new users is the shortcut inside the disk image because it breaks the isolation metaphor.

So, you download a file, and it's something called an "image" which opens in Finder like you'd inserted an external thumb drive. Fine. You open the image, and inside is... Your own Applications folder? Wait, how can the file I downloaded contain all of my apps?

This kind of indirection is natural to developers and other advanced users: the file you got from the internet doesn't really know about your Applications, it's a link to a generic system location that gets resolved by Finder. But for less advanced users it's oddly circular: this virtual disk that came from the internet has my data in it. It's something that never happens with an actual thumb drive.

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I don’t think less advanced users think that deeply about it.

They just see “oh, I drag the app to applications”. The main issue I’ve seen is that people try to run the .app from the disk image, or forget to eject the image after moving the app.

Well designed dmg drag-drop style deployments will actually put some background artwork with arrows and text instructions telling the user to drag and drop into Applications.

Still, I think .pkg package style installers are the most intuitive process for non-techies, especially those coming from windows where MSI and install wizard style exes are common.

> Still, I think .pkg package style installers are the most intuitive process for non-techies, especially those coming from windows where MSI and install wizard style exes are common.

Nope. It's an app that is simply the .app bundle, skipping the whole historical footnote of a .dmg completely. Once you first run it, it asks if you want to move it to Applications, and promptly restarts from its new location.

Good point. Why don’t more people do that? Compression?

Some apps used the disk image as a simple way to bundle up a little “installer”. This is lost by sending a .zip file.

The disk image could put a background image with instruction visual, decide the visual placement of icons. Applications could include folders with brush packs, example documents, user manuals and such.

The fact that it was a disk image could be seen as confusing if you read that closely, but if you ignore the file type it was simply an icon that you could double click to open a piece of installer UI.

A .app isn't a file, it's a folder. There's no good way to download a folder, you have to use zip, tar, dmg. I do like single binaries though, you certainly don't need a whole installer stage like Windows apps. Open package managers are even better

For installation, maybe. sometimes.

(The biggest issue I'm aware of is that if you have an old version of the app indexed anywhere on your root drive - for example in ~/qa/app-v1.02-DO-NOT-DELETE - it will literally stomp over that instead of installing the app to /Applications, even if the developer manually specified the install location as /Applications in the manifest.)

But for uninstallation, not a chance. There's no Mac equivalent to Add or Remove Programs on Windows - once you install a PKG good luck uninstalling it.

There's a tiny little arrow in the corner to indicate that it's a shortcut.

But this really confused me when I first started using macOS as well. You're just expected to know that the applications folder in the disk image you just downloaded isn't actually inside of the disk image.

When I first opened a .dmg, I thought the arrow symbolised some kind of progress bar and waited for a moment to let it do its installation. That didn't work, so I copy-pasted the folder into my Applications folder manually. When I later opened a different .dmg that had instructions about how I needed to drag and drop myself, I actually realised what I needed to do.

i actually vividly remember when they started introducing that flow... the first time i came across it was a total knee-jerk negative reaction. unrelated to that, i switched to windows a few years later (my old imac wasnt good enough to play world of warcraft)... but when i came back to it 10+ years later, it still felt strange.

i mean its neat from a minimalism perspective, but the decision to not ship with a regular installation UI in OG macOS X came with the tradeoff of not cleanly _uninstalling_ software either. config files etc were always left over.

but i guess - as Apple keeps locking down good old macOS X in favour of forcing software to go through the Apple Store this is going away as a sideeffect?

They haven't made any more moves in that direction since the store appeared. If anything, it's use seems to have declined since then. For awhile I would download a few apps from there, but when I did a fresh install this year I didn't even think about it and got nothing from there.

> came with the tradeoff of not cleanly _uninstalling_ software either. config files etc were always left over.

That's no different than windows or linux. The uninstallers leave configuration bits all over the place be it in the registry or config folders.

> but the decision to not ship with a regular installation UI in OG macOS X came with the tradeoff of not cleanly _uninstalling_ software either. config files etc were always left over.

But they have regular installers, they are called .pkg and look like a wizard. Programs distributed as a single .app don’t really need them though.

I think the typical user sees a .dmg as a folder and the application icon as a shortcut, much like users get confused about opening a .zip and trying to operate on the files they see without extracting first. Neither of these are technically true, but the two mental models end up making sense with the action in the end.

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