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Comment by newdee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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