Jason Kincaid

How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed?

Thursday, 17 September 2009

Alexander Limi has a thoughtful piece regarding the problems Mozilla has identified with the current installation process for Firefox on the Mac. As it stands, they’re following the common pattern of delivering the Firefox app on a disk image, which, when mounted, uses a background image and alias to the /Applications/ folder to encourage users to copy the app from the mounted image to their startup drive. Limi writes:

via daringfireball.net

I've always found the Mac's application install process to be stupid. It's very simple if you know what you're doing — certainly a step up from those painful multi-step Windows installers — but given that most people have no idea what a Disk image even is it's far more complicated than it needs to be.

The comedian Dane Cook apparently believes he is building his brand by pumping out a steady stream of comments on Twitter, the microblogging site that lets you broadcast 140-character messages to anyone who chooses to become your "follower." Cook's followers receive a regular series of bons mots: "Just got my hair cut. When finished she asked me, 'Do u want any product in your hair?' I said sure—how about dairy?" Or this: "The future is wide open. What a slut." Not laughing yet? How about: "I hollowed out the pages of a bible today & hid a smaller bible inside."

Cook's comments are so lame and unfunny that what he's actually doing is revealing, multiple times a day, how little talent he has. It's morbidly fascinating, kind of like the forbidden thrill you get watching Maury Povich's show or professional wrestling. You know it's awful. You know you shouldn't enjoy it, yet you can't look away. That, I'm afraid to say, is why I've come to believe that, of all the hellish things that have been spawned in the fever swamp that is the Internet, Twitter may turn out to be the most successful of them all—not in spite of its stupidity, but because of it.

I know Twitter has its uses, but looking at the Top Trends these days (which are often just celebrity names or stupid shit) I can't help but agree with Lyons on many of these points.