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Advanced Installer and Mac

Posted: October 13th, 2005 | Filed under: Programming, Software | 6 Comments »

Today I was busy with creating a BlogBridge distribution package for Mac OS X and had found that Advanced Installer supports only ZIP-packages and there’s no DMG support. Not that it distresses me, but the fact that an application bundle will look slightly different from all other native applications makes it all being a little less fun.

I don’t have Mac and I can’t judge whether it’s better to have an application in DMG or ZIP. For me DMG (Disk iMaGe) sounds like something having some additional support from OS, like automatic unpacking and applying standard installation procedures, whereas ZIP is somewhat general, which should be manually unpacked and installed.

Is that true or a ZIP-package with some specific internal structure is also handled in a special way?

6 Comments

  1. 1 Scott Kovatch said at 13:27 on October 17th, 2005:

    Have a look at this page for a discussion of installer technologies on the Mac. If all you’re going to do is make a simple bundled application (which, for a Web Start aoo I guess that’s what you’ll be doing) look at

    Hope that helps.

  2. 2 Scott Kovatch said at 13:28 on October 17th, 2005:

    Drat. Lost the links. Try Disk Images.

  3. 3 Aleksey Gureev said at 13:53 on October 17th, 2005:

    Thanks for the link! In fact, we don’t like Web Start for the poor and non-native installation experience, which is scarry and unfriendly. There’s a lot said on this matter both by us and other development teams and I don’t wish to double.

    All we wish is EXE/MSI for Windows, TGZ/RPM/DEB for Linux and DMG for Mac. It looks that we have found a good tool for building distribution installers — Advanced Installer for Java — and it does pretty good job. Unfortunately, it doesn’t generate DMG, but only ZIP. I know how to generate DMG using native Mac tools, but I don’t have Mac to do the builds and these tools are unavailable for the other platforms. As a person making builds for all platforms (Win/Lin/Mac), I wished to know is it only a myth that the generated (by AI) ZIP will behave like any other DMG installer or it’s true.

    That was the main point. Have anyone met a ZIP archive, which is behaving similar to standard DMG installer?

  4. 4 D'Arcy Norman said at 00:27 on October 23rd, 2005:

    Aleksey – I’m loving Blogbridge – a lot of nice work in the app. Some of the minor nits I have are a result of the Java Web Start management – the menu bar seems to revert to an in-the-window-menu rather than using the system menubar at the top of the screen, and the app appears twice in my dock (once with the proper icon, once as a generic java app). A MacOSX-specific application bundle should solve both of these issues.

    As for the .dmg vs. .zip distribution – most MacOSX apps are shipped as .dmg images, where you just drag the application from the mounted image to wherever you want it to live on your hard drive. No installer necessary – just drag and drop.

  5. 5 D'Arcy Norman said at 00:29 on October 23rd, 2005:

    oh, and I almost forgot – I download a LOT of software, and every app is just a straight download. Updates are fresh copies of the app that get dropped over top of the old one. The java web start thing is an anomaly – seems like it would be cool, but it’s not necessary. I’ve found on projects that I’ve worked on where we were distributing apps via JWS, I kept maintaining a custom standalone app just for me so I didn’t have to use the JWS version :-)

  6. 6 Aleksey Gureev said at 05:31 on October 23rd, 2005:

    Thanks for the comments! I hope the issues with Mac will be resolved with new ZIP/DMG native installer we are going to have for our final builds. Also, I wish to get iBook soon to help Pito with testing of BlogBridge on Mac.

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