Re: Installer UI advices

[Adrian Robert]

On Mar 10, 2005, at 1:35 PM, Jesse Ross wrote:

> I personally love the idea of drag and drop to install (or even 
> trigger an
> installer) -- it means we have a single, logical method of installation
> and it allows our users the "luxury of ignorance", as ESR says <
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html >. Office X 2004's
> installer is really nice too, in that you drag the apps off the disk 
> and
> drop them on your hard drive, like a regular app. Once you launch the 
> any
> of the apps, it determines whether you have installed any of the shared
> libs, and if not, goes through an installation process.

I'm not sure drag/drop install is appropriate for packages.  On OS X 
this is done for .apps that don't need any additional work (by scripts, 
etc.) or license agreement, and works because of their .dmg disk-image 
mounting framework.  On GNUstep, someone proposed using zipped .apps 
(.appz) to do a similar thing and that seems like a good plan when you 
just have a self-contained app.  But the need for delivering in a 
"package" arises when something that simple can't work -- either you've 
got files that need to go elsewhere on the disk, dependencies that need 
to be checked, scripts that need to run, etc..  In that case the user 
can and should interact with the process more than a simple drag/drop 
would allow.

(And when you do have to do this, the wizard UI seems the most 
reasonable and efficient way to get through it.  It is easier to rush 
through a wizard and be sure you've at least glanced at everything than 
to click around a tabbed or other non-sequential interface.  The wizard 
is also well-suited to delivering clear information to the user on what 
stage of an install process failed.)