[Targon]

Vise Installers and custom installers should be BANNED !!!

All software/drivers that need installation should be done so ONLY with Apple's Installer app.

Apple needs to force consistency for its users. Every time i have tried to install an app with some 3rd party custom installer they have other crashed, hung or other wise just failed. Performing these installations in front of potential new Mac users is embarrassing and does not demonstrate ease and simplicity the Mac stands for.

Vise installers are still junky assed carbon app's often they have no 'live scrolling' and offer no info as to what is installed and where.

Although the Apple installer does not provide an un-installer we can usually un-install a package with 'DesInstaller'.

I hope Apple enforces the use of their own installer.

[Randman]

Rumors that Tiger will allow for this via Software Update.

[Maflynn]

I guess I don't install too many apps because I've never heard of a problem.

Mike

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by Targon:
Performing these installations in front of potential new Mac users is embarrassing and does not demonstrate ease and simplicity the Mac stands for.

I guess the ones that just are a disk image allowing a drag n' drop are too hard to use as well, and should be banned too!
I have never run across an installer that never finished, but I am guessing it must be Carbon's fault.
Just what we need, Apple to develop more draconian attitudes.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by Maflynn:
I guess I don't install too many apps because I've never heard of a problem.

Mike

I guess you don't KNOW many people.
Or did you mean HAD instead of heard of ?

-t

[d4nth3m4n]

hey man, dont knock pacifist. thing has saved my hide more than once now.

[chris v]

I'm not big on VISE installers, especially ones that perform searches of your drives for whatever reason. If you've got mounted network drives or, god forbid, you forgot to eject your iDisk before running one, it'll hang forever. That's cludgy.

I like Disk images with drag and drop applications the best, myself. Apple's installer app is okay for programs that need to install things in more than one place. These should always include an un-installer which removes all of those things, but it's not often that they do. Unsanity is a great example of good use of installer apps.

CV

[chris v]

Okay, how many of you are old enough to remember the days when you used to have to drive to the store to purchase software, then install sometimes three or four disks, then re-start your computer sometimes two or three times in order to use it?

CV

[Angus_D]

FWIW Apple strongly recommends against the use of custom installers. This message has been continually reasserted by John Geleynse, Apple Worldwide Developer Relations' "User Experience Evangelist". See WWDC 2003 Session 001 "Delivering a Complete OS X User Experience".

They assert that drag and drop installation is the preferred method, as the entire application is self-contained and the user can choose where they want to place it (don't have to deal with cumbersome authentication dialogs, just as simple to remove it, can be used in a lab environment where the user doesn't have admin access, etc etc).

There are very few occasions where an installer is needed at all. And yes, InstallerVISE is pants.

[philzilla]

VISE sucks.

[OpenStep]

Originally posted by philzilla:
VISE sucks.

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by turtle777:
I guess you don't KNOW many people.
Or did you mean HAD instead of heard of ?

-t

I thought what I wrote was pretty clear.
Perhaps English is not your first language. I used the past tense of the word "hear" to communicate that I was unaware of this 3rd party installer issue and I had not incurred this problem myself.

If I used the word HAD as you suggested the sentence construction would not make sense. Since you do not KNOW me, you have no idea of how many people I truly do know and why include that in your reply as it is not germane to the thread.

Now instead of showing your intelligence (lack there of) by attacking me, why not comment on the subject matter.

Mike

[Horsepoo!!!]

For the longest time, Aspyr thought it was a swell idea to land VISE Installed games on us. (They might still do. )

I really don't get why developers don't get on the ball and release their products in .dmg or .pkg formats.

Notice that it's the old skool developers that are still using pure carbon frameworks to port their apps and refuse to make their apps bundles and insist on using VISE.

I personally boycott devs that use VISE. That'll teach 'em.

[CharlesS]

I hate VISE. I've had problems in the past with VISE installers, having to figure out why they wouldn't install properly and trying to work around it.

If it were an open format, it wouldn't be so bad, because there'd be a way to extract the files manually and maybe build the functionality into Pacifist. But it's completely closed, so it would require reverse engineering.

Vise ==

[Devin Lane]

One of the most prominent reasons why I am against the use of VISE installers is the stupid message that says that "No other applications can be run during this update/install." That is the most annoying thing I have every heard of, since it is clearly from OS 9. If I can install an OS update without having to quit other apps, I can surely install an update to a relatively insignificant program such as Virtual PC.

I believe that the VISE installers are catering to the OS 9 way of doing things, instead of forcing developers to jump on the OS X bandwagon by providing "native" installers.

[paully dub]

From their (Mindvision's) website:

"Installer VISE is quite simply the best software installer for the Macintosh, period! With Installer VISE you can easily build an installer that will reliably deliver your product to your customers. You can focus your energy on developing your software without worrying about the complicated details of writing an installer script.

and my favorite bit: When you need to modify, add, delete, or update files in your software distribution you will really appreciate the point and click and drag and drop simplicity of Installer VISE. In short, Installer VISE is the kind of Mac program that makes people select Macintosh in the first place."

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by paully dub:
From their (Mindvision's) website:

"Installer VISE is quite simply the best software installer for the Macintosh, period! With Installer VISE you can easily build an installer that will reliably deliver your product to your customers. You can focus your energy on developing your software without worrying about the complicated details of writing an installer script.

and my favorite bit: When you need to modify, add, delete, or update files in your software distribution you will really appreciate the point and click and drag and drop simplicity of Installer VISE. In short, Installer VISE is the kind of Mac program that makes people select Macintosh in the first place."

Good God.

[goMac]

I used to use other installers because .pkg didn't used to support resource forks like it does now.

: shrug :

[Chuckit]

Personally, I've always liked Unsanity's installer. Better than Apple's a lot of the time, actually.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by goMac:
I used to use other installers because .pkg didn't used to support resource forks like it does now.

: shrug :

It always supported resource forks. You just had to have a ._AppleDouble file in the same folder as the file in the package.

[goMac]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
It always supported resource forks. You just had to have a ._AppleDouble file in the same folder as the file in the package.

This I didn't know. I just knew that PackageMaker cut the resource fork.

I just coped with it by turning my apps into packages. This caused horrible NetInstall problems at work though. We just ended up going with ASR.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by goMac:
This I didn't know. I just knew that PackageMaker cut the resource fork.

I just coped with it by turning my apps into packages. This caused horrible NetInstall problems at work though. We just ended up going with ASR.

If all else fails, you can copy the app onto a UFS or MS-DOS formatted disk before making a package of it. That creates all the ._files automatically. Then you should be able to package it with the resource fork intact, no problems.

[goMac]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
If all else fails, you can copy the app onto a UFS or MS-DOS formatted disk before making a package of it. That creates all the ._files automatically. Then you should be able to package it with the resource fork intact, no problems.

Well, PackageMaker handles resource forks now.

The odd thing was even Apple was telling us at work to use ASR because of .pkg not working with resource forks. I believe you, but its hard to imagine our Apple guys as clueless.

Edit: Jees... it seems every time I make a post I'm running into you CharlesS.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by goMac:
Well, PackageMaker handles resource forks now.

Yeah, it sounded like you were saying it wasn't working right for you, so I was just saying how to do it yourself if you want, because the format used to store resource forks in a .pkg is the same one that's used to store resource forks on a UFS-formatted disk.

[yukon]

Kept getting an error with the Palm Desktop installer, VISE software, "File not found" I believe. Little did I know that it required administrator privledges and was trying to write to a system folder, it just gave a generic error when it couldn't (not a "could not write file"), and never mentioned anywhere it required privledges, never asked for a password, just started installing. I had to use a Windows PC to use the Palm software, until I realized weeks later what was probably going on.

I'd like Apple's installer to have an uninstaller, and to be more transparent in what the packages are going to do (pacifist is good), and then the users can avoid software that uses crazy installers....companies have to pay VISE, right? crazy....

[milhous]

oh heck, let's take it a step further and include compression/expansion utilities. you already have simple zip support in panther, and apple has their own installer which i believe is also free to use for other developers. so the question is, why even bother with the stuffit at all? screw those sit's, sitx's, and whatever else they have.

of course, won't happen because aladdin would get pissed off and apple needs all the developers they can get.

[arekkusu]

OK, while I have to agree that there are a lot of really crappy VISE installers out there, please realize that this has just as much to do with the person creating the installer as with VISE itself. Unlike (I think) most of you complaining here, I've actually used VISE. It's not a small or simple program. There are a lot of options, and it is extensible. I think a lot of the problems mentioned are due to bad usage of the options and 3rd party extensions:

Originally posted by Targon:
Vise installers ... offer no info as to what is installed and where.

VISE creates by default an "Installer Log" with the path of every single folder created and file copied. In OS 9 this used to go to the root of your drive. In X nowadays it goes into /Library/Receipts. But the person creating the installer can put it wherever they want, call it whatever they want, or not create it at all. It's up to them to get it wrong.

Originally posted by Devin Lane:
One of the most prominent reasons why I am against the use of VISE installers is the stupid message that says that "No other applications can be run during this update/install."

This is just a checkbox in VISE which the idiot using it forgot to uncheck. It was valid in 9 if fonts or extensions or whatnot were being installed. It should never be checked in X.


As for the bigger problem, I agree that a drag & install .dmg is the best thing to do. But there are still valid reasons for using a real installer. Apple does it for the OS. Any big app that has to install stuff outside of its own folder (/Library/Fonts, app support, etc) or needs custom install GUI (serial number entry and so on) needs an installer. And this is one reason why people still use VISE; the Apple installer isn't (last I checked) as extensible. If you want to play a Quicktime movie or something while installing, you can plug custom code into VISE to do whatever you want.

The other option is to do all of that custom work the first time the app is launched. MS Office did this on OS 9 (auto-repair...) I don't know if they still do it. But, this is a bunch of extra code (all the install logic, with permissions checking etc) that the app developer has to write. That work is already done in the installer, so people generally just use that.

Originally posted by paully dub:
"When you need to modify, add, delete, or update files in your software distribution you will really appreciate the point and click and drag and drop simplicity of Installer VISE. In short, Installer VISE is the kind of Mac program that makes people select Macintosh in the first place."

They're talking about the UI for _creating_ the installer in VISE. Not the user UI you get when you RUN the installer. And they are absolutely correct. VISE has a very Mac-like method of creating an installer. If you want to really torture yourself, go use InstallShield where you have to write code for everything, or RTPatch (even worse! brrrrr!) (those are both Windows products.)

[Appleman]

Originally posted by chris v:
Okay, how many of you are old enough to remember the days when you used to have to drive to the store to purchase software, then install sometimes three or four disks, then re-start your computer sometimes two or three times in order to use it?

CV

Old enough? hm, once I had to install Windows 95 which was on 30 floppies. As soon as I was at floppy 28, it stopped, and I had to re-install all 28 again....

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by goMac:
I used to use other installers because .pkg didn't used to support resource forks like it does now.

Yeah, well, you shouldn't be using resource forks. They'r ebad, hmmkay?

Originally posted by milhous:
oh heck, let's take it a step further and include compression/expansion utilities. you already have simple zip support in panther, and apple has their own installer which i believe is also free to use for other developers. so the question is, why even bother with the stuffit at all? screw those sit's, sitx's, and whatever else they have.

I haven't used a sit or sitx in ages. The problem is that they are horrible and nonstandard, and Aladdin's utilities have often been quirky and horrible (really poor performance out of Stuffit Expander - crappy carbon port, ugly GUI, etc). They're also non-free.

of course, won't happen because aladdin would get pissed off and apple needs all the developers they can get.

I'm sorry, have you been paying ANY attention to Apple's behaviour over the past few years? They have repeatedly shown that they don't care about third party developers if they feel it would benefit the platform as a whole if they implemented their own, competing solution. Not to mention, Aladdin isn't really a key player on the Mac market any more.

[Gavin]

Originally posted by chris v:
Okay, how many of you are old enough to remember the days when you used to have to drive to the store to purchase software, then install sometimes three or four disks, then re-start your computer sometimes two or three times in order to use it?
CV

Hell, I can remember my friend and I taking turns typing the Basic code in by hand from a computer magazine then saving it to an (optional!) audio cassette. The nearest computer store was an hour away by freeway (uphill, both ways!). And I'm not that old.

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
This is just a checkbox in VISE which the idiot using it forgot to uncheck. It was valid in 9 if fonts or extensions or whatnot were being installed. It should never be checked in X.

Doesn't that mean it's VISE's fault for even offering the option for OS X?


I also hate the way VISE spends time "searching" my drive. What's it searching for? Any explanation for that "feature?"

[philzilla]

Originally posted by Gavin:
Hell, I can remember my friend and I taking turns typing the Basic code in by hand from a computer magazine then saving it to an (optional!) audio cassette. The nearest computer store was an hour away by freeway (uphill, both ways!). And I'm not that old.

me and a friend built his ZX81 before we did anything like that. ahhh, thems were the days.

[chris v]

Originally posted by Gavin:
Hell, I can remember my friend and I taking turns typing the Basic code in by hand from a computer magazine then saving it to an (optional!) audio cassette. The nearest computer store was an hour away by freeway (uphill, both ways!). And I'm not that old.

I've written screensavers on an Atari 400. Through ten feet of snow.

CV

[goMac]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Yeah, well, you shouldn't be using resource forks. They'r ebad, hmmkay?

That doesn't exactly work in a NetInstall environment where you also want to deploy Mac OS 9 and classic software.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
I also hate the way VISE spends time "searching" my drive. What's it searching for? Any explanation for that "feature?"

It's looking for an already installed copy of the app it's installing, and it's too dumb to use LaunchServices to do it.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
It's looking for an already installed copy of the app it's installing, and it's too dumb to use LaunchServices to do it.

Personally I wouldn't trust LaunchServices with anything, either. But it certainly seems to be slower than a straightforward catalog search would be, so it's probably doing a recursive iteration over every file on the disk or something equally stupid.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Personally I wouldn't trust LaunchServices with anything, either. But it certainly seems to be slower than a straightforward catalog search would be, so it's probably doing a recursive iteration over every file on the disk or something equally stupid.

Why not? Yeah, the fantasy protocol attack is nasty, but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that LS is pretty good at looking up an app by its name, bundle ID, or creator code, and it'll find the app almost instantaneously.

[yukon]

About Stuffit, I agree. I've stopped using it, when there was a time I used it exclusivly. Apple's ZIP is free and much too easy, I haven't seen any problems with it other than no password support and errors expanding archives created with god-knows-what. TAR is a great idea, it stops people from RARing a folder of RAR files (TAR, Tape ARchiver, not physical tar, though that might be appropriate (pet peeve)), BZIP2 gives strong compression, GZIP being fast and slightly better than ZIP on some files, yet all very free. Just needs a BIN archiving utility for the old files with resource forks.

I still use Stuffit Expander though, it does many types of archives, I doubleclick and it does it's work and disappears. I've even started using it on .tar/gz/bz2 files. Still looking for a replacement, haven't found much. For compressing, DropTBZ2 was good but buggy, FreeTar is good (has dumb BIN support!) but I've seen bugs, Tar Pit is good but old prefs break it and it compresses temp files to the startup disk (mine is seperate from swap, i have little space on the system partition, can't compress large files).

Sorry, continue on about VISE, I just care about compression for some reason ;-)

[Gavin]

Originally posted by chris v:
I've written screensavers on an Atari 400. Through ten feet of snow.

Ha! An Atari 400 is what we were using. It had 48K of ram so my friend's dad thought it was better than the apple 2 which only had 32. He was convinced that 'Software' meant that weird padded keyboard.

[brachiator]

Originally posted by chris v:
I've written screensavers on an Atari 400. Through ten feet of snow.

CV

Hmm... I never wrote through that much snow. Through a six-inch stack of Hollerith cards, though, yes. Fortran-produced banners and calendars -- woo-hoo!

Never did figure out where the "science" part came in with those summer school and junior high "computer science" courses...

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Why not? Yeah, the fantasy protocol attack is nasty, but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that LS is pretty good at looking up an app by its name, bundle ID, or creator code, and it'll find the app almost instantaneously.

LS doesn't always get apps, and its behaviour if you have multiple copies is somewhat quirky.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
LS doesn't always get apps, and its behaviour if you have multiple copies is somewhat quirky.

If there's multiple copies, LS will get the one you've actually been using, the one that double-clicking a document would open.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
If there's multiple copies, LS will get the one you've actually been using, the one that double-clicking a document would open.

Hmm true, I guess it's a lot better these days. However in the past it was really weird. I hear it does sometimes return apps in the trash, though, which is a bit insane.

[Brass]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Hmm true, I guess it's a lot better these days. However in the past it was really weird. I hear it does sometimes return apps in the trash, though, which is a bit insane.

Yes, that is exceedingly annoying... when you double click a document for which you know the application is in the /Applications folder, but it won't work, because there's an old version in teh Trash you've forgotten about.

[timmerk]

Fools! You can't ban other installers. Many of them have features that Apple's does not have. Plus, doesn't anyone remember when VISE was the standard and greatest? (system 7 - OS 9) Anyways, those "Quit all apps first" is an option the dev turned on in VISE. VISE has many, many features that no one knows about. Go download it and see for yourself. Apple's installer sucks IMHO. VISE does too in many ways. That leaves the market open for a good one and we'll see who comes out on top.

[timmerk]

I forgot to mention - Mindvision came out with VISE X, which is a seperate codebase from the old OS 9 VISE cheaply ported to Carbon. It adds many OS X centric features. Here are some comparisons:

http://www.mindvision.com/products_comparison.asp

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
Personally, I've always liked Unsanity's installer. Better than Apple's a lot of the time, actually.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by timmerk:
Fools! You can't ban other installers. Many of them have features that Apple's does not have. Plus, doesn't anyone remember when VISE was the standard and greatest? (system 7 - OS 9) Anyways, those "Quit all apps first" is an option the dev turned on in VISE. VISE has many, many features that no one knows about. Go download it and see for yourself. Apple's installer sucks IMHO. VISE does too in many ways. That leaves the market open for a good one and we'll see who comes out on top.

The thing is, that option shouldn't be there in the first place for the OS X port (or at least, it should not do anything on OS X, since it is never needed).

And I'd still like to know why the damn Palm installer asks for your password, and then proceeds to not use it and give up with permissions errors.

Bottom line: Third-party installers should not be used because they are non-open formats. The .pkg packages can be worked around - something closed like VISE cannot.

[Millennium]

I might agree with you, if Apple's technology weren't such a piece of crap in this area.

Seriously. CharlesS' Pacifist software can remove many of the biggest warts in the current scheme, but even it can't clear away all of the problems, because of the fundamental flaws in the underlying technologies used in Apple's Installer. Vise installers do have their own issues -mostly in terms of minor interface issues- but when it comes down to doing the job of installing software they beat Apple's software up, down, sideways, backwards, forwards, and back in time a minute just so they can do it again.

At the very least, Apple needs to completely rip out the backend and replace it with a real package-management system. They were originally going to do this, actually (Debian's .deb system -which currently underlies Fink- was the prime candidate), but the lawyers got scared about licensing issues and so Apple chickened out. The licensing issues have been cleared, as evidenced by Apple including bash as the default shell in Panther, so there is no good reason to not switch everything over. Keep the current system in place for a release or two, solely as a matter of legacy support (though theoretically it should be possible to convert the installers) but stop supporting it other than that.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Millennium:
They were originally going to do this, actually (Debian's .deb system -which currently underlies Fink- was the prime candidate), but the lawyers got scared about licensing issues and so Apple chickened out. The licensing issues have been cleared, as evidenced by Apple including bash as the default shell in Panther, so there is no good reason to not switch everything over.

I don't remember hearing anything about this. Got a reference?

(The only thing I can think of is that Darwin used to be packaged using dpkg, these days it's rpm).