why an installer on Mac?

[maccouch]

Hello. I purchased Cogs on the humble bundle and just tried it. Although i like the game itself (but boy does it have some nasty puzzles...) i have a lot of  criticism regarding the installer it came on:

1: why an installer?! it's a mac app. it's self contained, all you need to do is either to provide it "zipped" or in a dmg file. after that it should just be drag and drop to the applications. Installer is unnecessary, dangerous (one can't usually see what an installer does) and prone to user problems

2: the installer fails. i don't understand why but it failed on me. every single time i tried it, it just failed without notice, on two macbooks.  Again, this is an unnecessary feature that just complicates more the user experience. I never understood where, if anywhere, it dropped the application.

3: why the f*** does it require an admin password? this is what i find more dangerous, reckless and simply nonsense. a simple application drag and drop shouldn't  require an admin password. that simple! and even in a installer, considering it just drops something in the app folder and i'm an admin user, it shouldn't either. I'm sorry but this is just bad&sloppy Mac practice from the the developer.

In the end i just ended looking inside the pkg file, found the archive.pax.gz, unizipped it, got the app file and just drag and dropped it in the app folder. the same thing it should have done since the beginning.


On the whole i must say i was very displeased and suspicious of this game installer. if i hadn't downloaded from the humble bundle page i would just never run the installer. And to be fair i just executed it because i  used a quicklook plugin to check out the installer through first. A regular user wouldn't know how or why to do it. If some of my relatives to whom i give tech support asked me what to do with an installed like this i would just say "drop it in the trash". No second thoughts.

You should really just drop the installer and simply provide a dmg file. Clean, simple, "usual" and security risk free (as long as cogs itself is a safe app of course).

best,
philip

[admin]

Thanks for the input.  I'll definitely take this into account on the next game update.  I'm from the PC and Linux world, so the idea of an installer makes a lot more sense than Mac's common "Drag the .dmg contents to the Application Folder" approach.  But maybe that's common enough on OSX that the Mac users prefer it.  I use Apple's first-party tools to create the installer, so I'm honstly not certain which checkboxes to tick or untick to make it NOT ask for an admin password.  If you know, please share.

To be honest, I hate Apple's tools for creating installer packages.  It frequently messes up the file privileges and does this weird "package relocation" thing that, on my dev machine, causes Cogs to get installed over my development version rather than in the Applications directory.  If anyone has tips or recommended tools for optimally packaging an app, I'm all ears!

  - Rob
    Founder, Lazy 8 Studios

[maccouch]

Hello Rob.
Thanks for hearing! it's  great when the developer actually hears and engages with its users/consumers!

I'm not a developer so i can't actually help you with the bells and whistles of Xcode. But a  straight to the point solution is just to simply provide the isolated Application  in a zip file. Clean and straight and everyone will know how to use it.

If you want to go the nice looking dmg way, which i admit is a bit more "professional looking", i did a couple of google search and found these links that might help you:

  http://www.araelium.com/dmgcanvas/       

  http://drnicwilliams.com/2009/02/03/choctop-packaging-and-deployment-of-cocoa-applications/

And you can simply use "disk utility" on the mac to do a dmg file from any folder, (File menu /  New / "Disk image from folder"  ) but it will simply be a blank dmg file with the files you've put in the original folder.


on a sidenote, you should try the simpler way of mac to do things  the self contained dragging app is a great thing and linux (and windows for that matter) should embrace it as much as possible. It's the installers that are "un-human" and confusing.  And in the linux side of things, if you had a self contained app with all of the dependencies and packages in a "chroot"-like environment, you wouldn't have the terrible mess and confusion that are the package management, the restricted in time, and versions, repositories and non-rolling distros, and all the just plain confuse&unusable side of linux. but that's another "ship" entirely.

thanks for your attention and good luck with your lazy8 studio!
philip

[pschastain]

I personally haven't installed it, nor will I, until a version is released that doesn't require admin privileges. Sorry, but games should be run in user land.

[admin]

Which version do you take issue with?  Both the Apple App Store and Steam versions are build according to their security guidelines, so I'm not sure what else to do with my build settings to make it suit your needs.

[maccouch]

try the game. its cool.

regarding your correct doubts about the installer, go "around" it. from my first post:

"In the end i just ended looking inside the pkg file, found the archive.pax.gz, unizipped it, got the app file and just drag and dropped it in the app folder. the same thing it should have done since the beginning."