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Feature
Distributing Your Application
A look into the various standard formats for Mac, Windows, and Linux
Issue: 4.2 (November/December 2005)
Author: Jonathan Johnson
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 5,994
Starting Page Number: 25
RBD Number: 4211
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.stuffit.com/
http://bitjuggler.com/products/appbundler/
http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
Congratulations! You're finished writing your program, and all ready to ship it. However, the question of what format to use when distributing your application is bothering you. These days there are many formats to choose from, each with their own gotchas and benefits -- it's often hard to choose a format. To make matters worse, each platform has its own standard, and the standards are still changing today.
Macintosh
StuffIt (http://www.stuffit.com/) has been around since the 1980s, and until recently has been the preferred way to package software. If you are deploying for Mac OS 8-9, there is no question, you should use StuffIt. However, Apple has been recommending other formats for OS X, and as of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) the free StuffIt Expander, which decompresses StuffIt files, isn't included anymore. Users with a fresh install of Tiger can't open several types of historical Macintosh file formats, and so the issue of using an alternative is more pressing.
Since Mac OS X was introduced, Apple has supported a disk image format known as DMG. These images can be used to spruce up your download by defaulting the view to 128x128 icons, and including a background image. DMGs can be created with Apple's free Disk Utility (found in the Utilities folder). The downside to DMG is that by default the compression isn't the best, so the downloads are slightly larger. However, there are free utilities available that can help compress DMGs further.
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