Vincent Gable’s Blog

September 17, 2009

Installing Mac Apps

Filed under: Accessibility,MacOSX,Programming,Usability | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on September 17, 2009

Today’s Daringfireball article on the shortcomings of the Mac application-install procedure is worth a skim. Gruber’s suggestion that Mac OS X automatically move 3rd-party applications into the /Applications/ folder on first-run, (a la the dashboard widget install process) is a good one1. Since Mac OS X already prompts you on first run (“Are you sure you want to run a program Apple didn’t write?”) it’s hard to see any downsides to this idea.

But that’s not the behavior we have today1.

Don’t Use a Damn .dmg!

As it stands today, I don’t see a good reason to ship your apps as a .dmg. I’ve been suspicious of disk images for a few years now; and usability tests show that people get confused by them.

Distribute your application as a single .app in a .zip archive. What possible use are other files besides the application? If a “Readme” file should be read before using the application, then show it when the application is first launched.

Installers are opaque and un-Mac like. There’s always a risk that they’ll install something that breaks the computer. As a developer I am even more suspicious of installers on the Mac, because I know how broken Apple’s installer tools are.

Of course, as a developer, I know that applications do sometimes need to install components. And here the best solution is for the application to check it’s environment and ask to install missing components as needed (in essence be it’s own installer). It’s more robust, since it detects-and-corrects missing or damaged components. It always preserves the user-facing abstraction that the icon is the application.

Applications shouldn’t install hacks dangerous enough to require a bundled user-facing unisntaller. To make IMLocation work, I had to install a background process — but I made it intelligent enough that it would uninstall itself if the main application had been deleted. Yes, this is more work, but it’s worth it.


1Another idea is to make Safari and Firefox smart enough to download applications directly into the right /Applications/ folder, bypassing the usual downloads folder. This elegantly solves the instillation problem, although it creates some new problems.

2Although it would be a cool hack to write.

February 9, 2009

Now Recognizing President Barrack Abeam

Filed under: Design,Programming,Usability | , , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

President “Barack Obama” is not recognized by my Mac’s spellchecker. Firefox, Microsoft Word1, Mac OS X — each of them has a built in spellchecker, and none of them know how to say our president’s name. Spell checker dictionaries need to be updated more frequently — to keep up with the emails we write.

Things have improved since 1995, but there’s still a long way to go.

There’s more to say about how to fix things, but someone has already said it. The future looks bright,

(Microsoft) now scans through trillions of words, including anonymized text from Hotmail messages, in the hunt for dictionary candidates. On top of this, they monitor words that people manually instruct Word to recognize. “It’s becoming rarer and rarer that anything that comes to us ad hoc isn’t already on our list” from Hotmail or user data, Calcagno says. According to a July 14, 2006, bug report, for example, the Natural Language Group harvested the following words that had appeared more than 10 times in Hotmail user dictionaries: Netflix, Radiohead, Lipitor, glucosamine, waitressing, taekwondo, and all-nighter.

I think the next step in spellchecking is to follow Mac OS X’s lead, and adopt a system-wide spellchecker. When there’s only one instance of a spellchecker running (not a separate one for every program that might work with text) we can make it much smarter, without requiring a supercomputer.


1


Microsoft added Barack and Obama to Office’s dictionary back in April 2007, but unfortunately, that change hasn’t yet made it to the Mac Ghetto, ahem, “Mac BU”. Or at least I haven’t seen it in Word yet.

June 20, 2008

Modern Browsers

Filed under: MacOSX,Programming,Quotes | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on June 20, 2008

… What struck me watching these (WebKit) demos is that you could build a really slick web app UI using stuff like the canvas tag, SVG, and advanced CSS. Yes, none of this stuff works in IE, and IE still has massive market share — but not among the sort of people who adopt hip new web apps. The combined market share for, say, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 is larger than the overall market share for Mac OS X. Plenty of developers write desktop software that only works on the Mac — why aren’t more people writing apps web apps that only work in truly modern web browsers? The first one to do it is going to be a sensation.

John Grubber

I didn’t have a sense for how far behind IE lags, historically and today, until I saw this compatibility table (via Toby Jungen),

Calculation of support of currently displayed feature lists

Internet Explorer Firefox Safari Chrome Opera
Far Past 6.0: 4% 2.0: 34% 3.1: 43% 0.2: 54% 9.0: 35%
Past 7.0: 12% 2.0: 34% 3.1: 43% 0.2: 54% 9.0: 35%
Present 8.0: 29% 3.0: 48% 3.2: 67% 1.0: 54% 9.6: 58%
Near Future (2009) 8.0: 29% 3.5: 78% 4.0: 88% 2.0: 84% 10.0: 63%
Future (2010 or later) 9.0: 29% 4.0: 86% 4.*: 88% 2.0: 84% 10.*: 72%

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