Installerless installation on OSX?

[Devin Asay]

Graham,

Many big-name companies distribute there Mac OS X apps this way-- 
MicrosoftOffice, BBEdit, and Firefox all are simple .dmg files that  
you mount, then drag the app to wherever you want. Unless you need to  
do some behind the scenes fiddling with System-level entrails, it  
seems to me the easiest and most straighforward approach. If the end  
user wants the app available to all users, they put it into the  
Applications folder, provided of course that they have admin rights.  
If the end user doesn't want to give global access or has no admin  
rights, they could just copy it to their own ~/Applications folder in  
their user home.

Devin

On Apr 13, 2006, at 9:11 AM, Graham Samuel wrote:

> I want to distribute a structurally simple RR-developed application  
> to Mac OSX users (it's the standalone itself and a couple of sample  
> folders). In testing, all I've done is to copy the app (which we  
> all know is really a folder) to somewhere convenient on the user's  
> hard disk. The user then double-clicks and that's it. Is there  
> anything wrong with this strategy? Why do people have installers  
> and .dmg files if so? I sense that one reason might be that the  
> machine potentially has many users, all but one of whom won't have  
> administrator privileges - as I'm not in this situation myself, I  
> don't really know.
>
> I want the simplest possible strategy for distribution. Any advice  
> will be gratefully received, as ever.
>
> Graham
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -----
> Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK and France
>
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Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University