As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

10 pointsposted 21 hours ago
by allenc

4 Comments

al_borland

21 hours ago

I’ve always appreciated the effort and creativity developers put into making this a good experience, and a learning experience for new users. After all, you never know which app will be someone’s first install. A well made dmg was how I learned to install apps on OS X when I first moved to it 23 years ago.

Some developers have gotten lazy with this and expect users to just know. As a result I’ve seen many people running an app out of the dmg file itself for a long time, then they wonder why they have a bunch of stuff mounted.

smallerize

20 hours ago

Is the quote in the title a reference to something?

allenc

8 hours ago

Yeah, it's about how Windows has .msi installers, whereas for MacOS it's a .dmg where you copy the exec binary (which itself is a folder) into the /Applications folder.