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.

★ Friday, 18 September 2009