Linked List: September 18, 2009

Friday, 18 September 2009

Apps That Move Themselves to the Applications Folder ★

Regarding yesterday’s piece on how Mac apps should be distributed to users, a bunch of readers emailed or tweeted to point out two exemplary apps: Delicious Library and Potion Factory’s The Hit List.

Delicious Library ships on a disk image, and if you try to launch the app directly from the image, the app detects what you’ve done and asks if you’d like it to install itself in your Applications folder. The Hit List ships in a zip archive, and does the same thing if it detects that it’s been launched from a folder other than Applications.

Potion Factory’s Andy Kim has a good write-up here regarding how he came to this clever design.

Update: JNSoftware’s Dialectic does something similar.

Martin Pilkington’s M3InstallController ★

Open source from Martin Pilkington:

M3InstallController is a class that will warn users if they are running your application from a disk image and offer to install the application in their Applications folder.

See Hidden Files in Snow Leopard’s Open and Save Dialogs ★

Great Snow Leopard detail from Rob Griffiths:

In any Open or Save dialog in Snow Leopard, simply press Shift-Command-Period to display hidden files and folders. This command is a toggle; hidden files will be displayed as you navigate various directories in the Open or Save dialog.

Google Un-Redacts Its FCC Filing Regarding Google Voice and the App Store ★

I don’t really see why they asked for any of this to be redacted in the first place. Clearly, though, Google doesn’t see the difference between “not accepted” and “rejected” that Apple claims to see.

MG Siegler on the Importance of Enthusiasm ★

MG Siegler, on the “Incredible, Amazing, Awesome Apple” supercut video that made the rounds this week:

While certainly there is some element of hearing something so many times that you start to believe it, that’s nothing new, any good salesman will do the same thing. But why I think the tactic works so well with Apple is because they actually believe what they’re saying. Just watch Steve Jobs in that video. It sure seems like he’s damn sure that what he’s talking about is amazing. He’s excited about it. So is Phil Schiller and the others on the Apple team. And that excitement translates on a level unseen.

Agreed. And on the flip side, it’s always obvious when Jobs is not enthused about what he’s talking about on stage. E.g. this piece I wrote three years ago:

Jobs’s extraordinary marketing savvy and famed reality distortion field leave some people with the impression that he’s a talented fabulist. That’s wrong, though — Jobs, in my opinion, is a terrible liar and a poor actor. When he’s able to convince people of things that aren’t true, or that are exaggerations of the truth, it’s because he believes what he’s saying. The reality distortion field isn’t something he projects willfully; it’s an extension of his own certainty. Remember his onstage demo last year of the Motorola Rokr iTunes- compatible phone? His contempt for the device was palpable; when he failed to successfully switch from song playback to accept a call, he seemed poised to just toss the thing off-stage and cry out that it was a piece of garbage.

Jason Fried on Mint’s Sale to Intuit ★

With a title like “The Next Generation Bends Over”, you know it’s good.