It's true for simple applications, but those simple applications are just
anything that can be written to be statically linked into a single binary.
You could do this on Windows if you were prepared to stick to those rules -
and you can produce quite powerful applications that way, if you cared to do
it. But you'd have to forgo anything that needs a shared library or
framework or fonts - basically anything bigger than a single file. Apple's
page "Installs for Product Developers" says:
For anything that requires something shared, it's a myth. The icon you
drag-and-drop is an installer. It's just that drag-and-drop invokes the
installer, the same way that double-clicking invokes an MSI installer. See
'Managed Installs' in Apple's Software Delivery Guide at
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/SoftwareD
istribution/Managed_Installs/chapter_5_section_1.html.
I think the difference really is that there isn't such a prevalence of
shared libraries on the Mac as on Windows, and of things like multiple disk
volumes. To upgrade your Mac, you buy a new one, you don't start adding
disks (because on most Macs, you can't add internal disks). It makes for a
far simpler environment. Also, the pace of support for new operating systems
is much faster, most Mac apps won't install on the OS earlier than one
version before current. A lot of us are still writing software to work on
Windows 2000 (I hope no-one here is still building ANSI apps for Windows 9x
though!) There are also many, many places where Windows allows plug-ins
(e.g. Explorer context menus) that just aren't there on the Mac.
Microsoft's approach tends to be to offer many new features even on
down-level operating systems. Imagine if your customers had to update to
XP.3 in order to get .NET 2.0, or Windows Vista 6.1 to get .NET 3.5! But
that makes deployment much more complicated, because you have to deploy the
framework you depend on, and its dependencies, to get your program to work
at all.
Also Mac apps tend to be less configurable. The million-questions approach
taken by most Windows install packages is ridiculous when you consider that
most users just go with the defaults. Clicking through Windows Installer
wizards is a pain in the neck. It's not as if selecting a reduced install of
Office 2003 or 2007 actually reduces the disk space used, because (to
prevent problems with finding original media when patching or repairing) a
complete copy of the install is cached on your hard disk anyway. You might
as well install the whole thing to begin with. And a repair is only
necessary when some shared component has been stomped on with an
incompatible version anyway.
--
Mike Dimmick
_____
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Scott Palmer
Sent: 13 May 2008 19:58
To: Josh Rowe
Cc: WiX Users
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] yep - back to being 100% frustrated
On a Mac you would just drag and drop the application icon. The very
existence of an installer is frowned upon for most things. Why doesn't
Microsoft rip-off that instead of the desktop eye-candy? :-)
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