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Create a customized look for disk images in 10.3
Authored by: thornrag on Nov 07, '04 05:07:27PM

If I may, as a user of software applications delivered as Disk Images, make a plea to developers and packagers of software:

1. Don't turn off the Finder toolbar. In Panther, it only means I have to open another window to install your application, whereas, with my toolbar visible, I can just drop your application into my Applications folder in the toolbar.

2. Don't encode and compress your disk image needlessly. Please. Please. Please stop sending out disk images as .dmg.tar.gz, .dmg.sit.hqx, or other insane permutations of file compression and encoding.

Some tips:
- Disk images are safe to be transmitted over the internet as-is. No special encoding, such as MacBinary, is needed; a disk image has no resource fork. By Macbinary-encoding a disk image, you only increase the size of the file.

- Disk images may be saved as read-only compressed, which will in most cases offer compression comparable to .zip and is almost always as good as Stuffit. Even when its compression is inferior however, it does mount without being run through another app, which in the end saves more time and disk space than what is lost by using the slightly inferior built-in compression.

Here's what to do:

Release your software in a read-only compressed disk image. Don't go back and then re-compress (bad idea) or macbinary-encode (no point) the disk file. It's a waste of time and space.

And don't turn off the Panther toolbar. Your users will like to be able to just drop your app onto their Applications folder without opening another window.

By following these steps on your end, you reduce the steps your user must follow on their end to three: download the image, open the image, and drop your icon into their Apps folder.

Otherwise, you have your users downloading a file, running it through multiple decode/decompress processes using inefficient and ugly third-party software, then opening the image, and then turning on their toolbar or opening another finder window before they can even start using your app.

As a footnote ... okay fine. Your disk image is 137 MB as a read-only compressed image. It's 60 MB as a gzip-compressed disk image. Use gzip if you must. But there's no need to .tar it first! Just gzip the dmg!

Sincerely,
A befuddled disk image user



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