A stupid newbie question
Richard A. O'Keefe
ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Tue Oct 9 22:01:02 UTC 2001
I wrote that double-clicking an image just works on a Mac.
G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:
You are missing the point that for a normal user - not the
computer-fun-people - the best solution is to put all materials in one box
and if they want to use it, they only would have to open that box:
windows-shorthand for that: "give me a .exe"
This is completely irrelevant to the topic I was addressing.
I have tried to help my local kindergarten install games from CD on
their Windows box. As an experienced computer user (indeed, experienced
software engineer and university lecturer) I can only say that it was
an EXTREMELY complex and frustrating process. Anything further from the
"just give me a .exe" would be harder to imagine.
Huge numbers of files *would* copy from the CD, and would work as long as
the CD was still in the drive, but take the CD out and things failed
mysteriously. Once you've spent a couple of hours trying to install
games and failing, the story that application installion is easy on
Windows sounds like a very VERY sick and not at all funny joke.
I note that some of the software I have installed on my Mac arrived as
a "disk image", it's one file and one icon as far as the user is concerned,
but when you click on it a lot of stuff happens.
I also note that most of the programming kits on my Mac arrived as single
Stuffit archives. That is, I was provide just one file, one thing to
download. But when activated, they unpacked into directories, sometimes
with hundreds of files.
The number of files there *are* in an application *once it is installed*
and the number of files the user *has to touch* to make installation happen
are very different things. The fact that a Squeak application might want
a VM, some sources, an image, lots of pictures, and some squeak-books
doesn't mean that the *user* ever has to touch more than one file.
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