Jetplane Journal » downloads http://jetplanejournal.com Tech opinions, reviews and how-to's. No Jetplanes. Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:49:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= JetLinked: Installing applications on the Mac still broken http://jetplanejournal.com/jetlinked-installing-applications-on-the-mac-still-broken/ http://jetplanejournal.com/jetlinked-installing-applications-on-the-mac-still-broken/#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 07:37:23 +0000 Adrian http://www.jetplanejournal.com/?p=963 Lukas Mathis has posted some thoughts on the issues Mac newcomers have with .dmg files. I also talked about this issue a while back in a post on the most common issues switchers have, but it’s worth noting it again. I agree with his followup post that adding another file format isn’t really the way to go either –   DMG files are a great feature to have – once you’ve understood them. But from a usability and customer support perspective, a simple zip file seems to be the better choice.

I’d still be interested to see what kinds of customer support issues you run into with zip files though:

  • Do people using alternative browsers, that don’t automatically open “safe” files like Safari does, struggle with them?
  • Do users who prefer to manually download updates have several versions of the same app sitting in their Downloads folder?
  • Are there any issues if users have a 3rd party archive tool installed (I’m looking at you StuffIt)?

But despite those questions, I think there is a valid reason to reconsider whether .dmg files should still be considered “best practise” for app distribution.

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