Installer Roundup
Volume Number: 10
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Tools of the trade
The last thing you think of may be the first thing your customer sees!
By Kevin Savetz
Your software probably arrives on your users’ desks on floppy disks, perhaps
sealed in a little white envelope covered in tiny lawyerspeak. Your manuals may be
thick and your tech support may be free, but before the user can run your software,
they need to install it onto a computer system. Getting it there is half the battle -
welcome to the wonderful world of software installers.
As the advertisements for just about all of the following products will tell you,
your software installer is an important - but often overlooked - part of your product.
Most of today’s software products are disk space gluttons that must be distributed on
multiple floppy disks. The installer is a program that takes the files on your product
distribution disk(s) and puts them in their appropriate locations on the end user’s
computer.
Depending on your needs and the complexity of the installer, the program may
make decisions on the best way to install the files on the user’s computer - based on
installation “rules” that you define. For instance, you may have versions of your
program for color and monochrome systems, or for machines with and without an FPU
chip. Many installers feature various types of compression, necessary on all but the
smallest products, which saves space on your distribution disks by compressing your
files by two to three times.
On the Macintosh, the most familiar installer is surely Apple’s own. If you’ve
ever (re-)installed System 7 on a Mac, you’re already familiar with Apple’s
Installer. Traditionally, creating installers for your applications that look and feel
like Apple’s has been a laborious process, requiring coding of “installer scripts” that
define how the installer works. Multi-disk installations and rule-based installations
only complicate this process. A couple of the installer-creation applications seek to
ease the pain of creating Apple-esque installers by doing the majority of the work for
you.
Apple’s Installer offers a number of features, and we’ll cover a few briefly.
Custom splash screens are as simple as having a named PICT in your script. You can
add custom code resources for before and after actions. For example, you could have an
“after” action to decompress a file once it’s copied into place. You could also write
custom code to play a sound (maybe to teach users how to pronounce your product
name) or bring up a dialog to remind your customer to do something.
Apple’s Installer in action
Although Apple’s installer is elegant for the end user, and it’s extremely
powerful, e specially with complicated installs (like Apple system releases), it may
not be everything you want. It is quirky and doesn’t handle very complex installation
decisions. So, a variety of applications exist for creating other types of installers.
Although the end products of these applications lack the look and feel of Apple’s own
Installer (some would say this is a definite plus!) they often include features absent in
the standard installer like built-in file compression and so forth.
Which installer is right for you? Naturally, this depends on many things. How
much time do you have to create the installer? If your product is already a month past
the expected shipping date, you probably won’t want to spend a week or more writing a
custom installer script.
Are you a programmer? Some installer applications require that you muck about
in MPW, Think C or ResEdit to create a customized installer; others do all the dirty
work for you. Touching up an installer isn’t a problem for most developers - but
ready-to-go installers are a great choice for non-programmers or those who couldn’t
possibly stand to eye another line of code. Some of these installers are so easy to use
that non-programming members of your organization may very well be able to build
installers for you.