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     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Tuesday, January 7, 2003
01:35 - A little something else...

(top) link

Something I saw happening with the iSync and iCal updates, and now too with Safari, is that Apple is taking fuller advantage of how Disk Copy can present a user-friendly "installation" procedure.

It used to be the case that disk images were versatile, but unnecessarily esoteric to casual users. You'd download a .dmg file, double-click on it, enter a password if necessary, maybe sign a EULA, and then... you'd have a virtual disk mounted on your desktop, which you then had to open up, drag the contents from it into your Applications folder (or wherever), and then trash the disk and the .dmg file. Lots of functionality, but not a whole lot of sense.

Well, now they're taking a more classy approach. I don't know if this is a new feature in Disk Copy (the current version is 10.2.3, dated 12/17/02, and evidently came with the 10.2.3 OS update)-- but it certainly makes things smoother. Disk Copy prompts you for whatever it's going to prompt you for. Then it "mounts" the disk image, with the progress bar and details and stuff. But then, instead of displaying a virtual disk on the desktop, Disk Copy actually mounts the contents-- or copies the contents off, right onto the desktop-- with the result that you're left with nothing but the application (a single object, as with Safari, or single folder, depending on how it's packaged) and the original archive file (which evidently can be a .dmg.bin file, which StuffIt Expander passes off invisibly to Disk Copy with no interim decoded file). That's just two easily understood items, and people know what to do with both-- if not instinctively, at least a lot more intuitively than with the virtual-disk step.

So you get all the packaging features of Disk Copy, with the straightforwardness of a vanilla archiver. Pretty sweet. Never let it be said that they let "good enough" alone.

Now to hope they're serious enough about Safari to act smartly on all the bug reports and usability feedback that I and others will be sending in over the next few weeks. After all, browsers are perhaps unique in being used universally by everyone from novices to total power users. They can't cater to one without supporting the other, and that's a big hunk of chaw to bite off...

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© Brian Tiemann