Preserved Topic: Question about Mac OS programs

How are programs installed on a Mac?

I'm a WinPC user and know bugger all about how program installations / uninstallation works for the mac. Do they work like windows by adding registry keys and the like or is it simple a matter of copying files over to install and deleting them to un-install?

The reason I ask is because I want to create a program installer for the Mac using Director. I can do this easily enough with windows by using an xtra to set registry keys, add start menu items and transfer files from CD to hard disk but on a Mac, I'm lost.

Any help would be appreciated.

p.s. this is most likely for OS X but I might also make an OS 9 version too.

Dracusis: I ran across this the other day (from the man who gave you Diveinto... mark, accessibility and python):
http://diveintoosx.org

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

http://www.macdevcenter.com comes to mind. You might find what you're looking for there as well.

Nice link Emps.

edit: added this to the FAQ.

[This message has been edited by cyoung (edited 03-07-2003).]

Nup, I couldn't find any information about it at those sites either. ...

Thanks for the links though, I found some answers to questions I'd yet to ask =)...

Do you even "Install" programs on a Mac or do you just copy files into a specified directory?... <- Just knowing that would help. I'm sure there's a mac user here that could answer that.

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 03-08-2003).]

quite a few OS-X apps install with a drag and drop from a .dmg file but some that involve system processes use an installer.

I run OS X (10.2.4 at the moment). I can tell you that some programs are indeed .dmg files, which I believe stands for disk image. My experience with those has been that once it's on your hard drive you double click and they run the app. There is also a native application in the utilities folder called "installer". I think this is some sort of gui for a unix based installer program. When it installs an app it prompts you for the root level passphrase and takes care of everything from there. I could be wrong too, I don't dabble much in the coding realm. Maybe you could sniff out a shareware developer that would know? Whatever you find out, please share. It's not a question with an answer that's easily found. I tried Apples support site and found nothing but bad install issues and such. Google wasn't much help either..

Ok, after sever hours of searching I've turned up a couple of interesting articles:

This one is about installers and OS X: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/SystemOverview/InstallIntegrate/chapter_13_section_18.html

This is for Director and how to create a dual OS 9 and OS X bundled projector for CD-ROM distrubtion: http://www.macromedia.com/support/director/ts/documents/bundle_proj.htm

There are also several commercial multi-OS installers that will create compressed installer packages for Win/Mac OS's and often these are free when their being used for shareware/freeware applications.
Aparently Public Access Software has several installers -> www.pasoftware But their website hasn't been working for a day or two now
The other installer I found that also supports the Mac is Mind Vision's Installer VICE: http://www.mindvision.com/products.html