But I say sincerely, and without malice, that I hope they are forced to find some other way to make that buck. I appreciate that the guys at Allume have every right to try to make a buck. Once upon a time, Stuffit solved a real problem. And, apparently, they've done a good job of fooling people into thinking their format is essential, since lots of newly developed Mac apps (for example about half of these games) are compressed with Stuffit. The thing that I find maddening here is that the makers of Stuffit are trying to facehug their way into getting you to pay for a service that already works great for free. If you try and download StuffIt from their website you HAVE to give them a valid email address, so that they can spam you and try and persuade you to buy the "deluxe" version. The only way they could possibly make their software less pleasant to install and use would be if, whenever I double-clicked the application, bees flew out of my Mac's USB port and stung me in the eyes.ĭon't believe me? Here's a sample of the comments up at versiontracker on this issue: Unbelievable: Allume are now up on my "most hated" list, surpassing Real. It's as if the idea that an application should be self-contained is repulsive to the authors of Stuffit. Ask yourself: what conceivable justification does one have for installing an extension to run a user-level uncompression routine? After you upgrade to Tiger, Stuffit Expander stops working until you find (by hand!) the "Stuffit Engine" file and put it into the right magic directory (or, you can just give up and reinstall Stuffit from scratch). Basically, Allume deserves some sort of Annoyance Award for managing to craft an app distribution mechanism that is actually worse than RealPlayer's. If you go to Allume's web site and try to download the "free" edition of Stuffit, you'll end up downloading the time-limited demo of their full product, which nobody in the entire world actually wants. So unless you're targeting your application for Mac OS 9 (in which case I hate you), using Stuffit costs you money (because you have to buy the packaging app), prevents some percentage of users from using your app at all (because they will never buy or install Stuffit), and makes those who do have Stuffit installed go through a little bit of pain (because they have to sit there while a comparatively super-slow Stuffit process forks and does its thing).įurthermore, each successive edition of Stuffit has become more and more facehuggerware. sit form (or even worse, BinHex) for no good reason whatsoever. When I realized this, just for fun, I consciously decided to not install Stuffit at all to try to simulate the new user experience (after all, if my Grandma bought a new Mac, she'd have no idea that Stuffit even existed, right?) And what I've noticed is that there are a surprising number of applications that are distributed in. Even after an archive install, Stuffit doesn't work out of the box - you have to reinstall. I don't know why, but it doesn't particularly bother me as mentioned above, OS X supports the saner (and less encumbered). Relying on Stuffit is even more foolish now that OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is out, because Stuffit Expander doesn't ship with the OS anymore. Number of additional programs your users have to download or purchase to uncompress your software: none. Control-click on it and choose "Make an archive of this folder." Congratulations, you now have a zip file that can be distributed to your users (and, since Stuffit will uncompress zip files, you're not even leaving your three or four OS 9 users out in the cold.)Īmount of extra money you had to spend to package and compress your software: $0.Īmount of extra money your users had to spend to uncompress your software: $0. Even if you feel that creating a compressed disk image with Disk Utility is too much work, you can make a distributable archive that's more compatible, easier to use, and faster to both pack and unpack. More to the point, you are doing unnecessary extra work to ship your software (and paying money that would be better spent on pizza and coke, to boot.) sit form, then every Mac user in the world has to do extra work in order to use your software. If you are distributing your software in. Every single thing that Stuffit does is done better by services that are built in to the operating system. Stuffit is evil, and must be destroyed.įirst and foremost, Stuffit is an application that, under OS X, serves absolutely no useful purpose. Today I would like to try to force Mac developers to stop using Stuffit. Given a tool that does roughly 80% of the job we need to do (such as Emacs, or the X Windowing System), we are inclined to grab on to it with both hands and refuse to let go until we are forced to. I know very well that software developers are creatures of habit.
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