Installs taking longer than downloads
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I read an interesting point in Bill Gates' usability email[^] (from the Insider.)
The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes.
I hadn't thought of it until now but a few years ago it took hours to download an application and at most 30 minutes to install the app. I used to often leave downloads overnight, ready to install in the morning. These days I can get 500mb in a couple of minutes. Installers however have only got slower. Adobe CS3 takes about an hour to install properly. The download takes 15 minutes. Weird.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
I just installed CS3 in under 20 minutes, but if you compared my machine to the ones that I installed photoshop 7 on it should have taken 5.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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I just installed CS3 in under 20 minutes, but if you compared my machine to the ones that I installed photoshop 7 on it should have taken 5.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
You check all the options?
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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You check all the options?
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
I think I'm going to have one of those oh, crap moments. No, I just did the default install. What am I missing out on, or actually my wife in this case?
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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I think I'm going to have one of those oh, crap moments. No, I just did the default install. What am I missing out on, or actually my wife in this case?
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
I can't remember, my brain has blanked that day out and only the wreckage remains. I just looked at the product page for CS3 Design Premium and I installed all of it:
\* Adobe InDesign® CS3 \* Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended \* Adobe Illustrator® CS3 \* Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional \* Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3 \* Adobe Acrobat 9 \* Plus Adobe Fireworks® CS3The first two times I tried to install it failed because of files hanging around from a beta/trial. At a later date I had a clean machine and the install went better, plus I only checked Photoshop, Flash and Acrobat 9.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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I can't remember, my brain has blanked that day out and only the wreckage remains. I just looked at the product page for CS3 Design Premium and I installed all of it:
\* Adobe InDesign® CS3 \* Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended \* Adobe Illustrator® CS3 \* Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional \* Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3 \* Adobe Acrobat 9 \* Plus Adobe Fireworks® CS3The first two times I tried to install it failed because of files hanging around from a beta/trial. At a later date I had a clean machine and the install went better, plus I only checked Photoshop, Flash and Acrobat 9.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
Yeah, that's pretty close to what I installed it was one of their student packages with Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Photoshop plus a couple others. I do have a 2.66Ghz processor and a 4 drive raid array though. ;P All for $1,100, new egg rocks.
I can imagine the sinking feeling one would have after ordering my book, only to find a laughably ridiculous theory with demented logic once the book arrives - Mark McCutcheon
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Trollslayer wrote:
I don't use it however.
Curious, what do you use, Windows XP?
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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Paul Watson wrote:
Aero, UAC, rough edges, inconsistencies, change-for-change-sake and no command-line improvements. I've gone back to Windows XP when I need Windows.
I've found UAC to be a good improvement... why it needs to darken the entire desktop is a bit of a mystery, but the functionality is nice. My single biggest gripe about Vista is the complete botch job that is Windows Explorer. Nothing quite works the way I expect it to: navigating UP a folder is just silly (the address bar tries to do too many things), view settings are always wrong (yeah, I'd love to rate my CPP files out of 5 stars, thanks) and continually need to be reset, even with SP1 file copying (and moving!) is startlingly slow, and it crashes. Otherwise Vista has kinda grown on me. :)
Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see; But microscopes are prudent In an emergency! -Emily Dickinson
David Kentley wrote:
why it needs to darken the entire desktop is a bit of a mystery
That's a good bit of usability design, IMO - UAC is a system modal action, so darkening the desktop focusses you exclusively on the UAC dialog
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Simon Stevens wrote:
Interesting, so maybe I should be blaming windows for my pdf woes.
Ah no, blame Adobe. The Adobe Reader app. is slow on Mac OS X too. But Mac OS X has built-in PDF viewing so it is unfairly fast. Technically Windows could do it too but I imagine Adobe would sue Microsoft or something equally pathetic. FoxIt is your best bet on Windows. If you use Firefox 3 then this extension[^] is pretty handy too.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
Paul Watson wrote:
Technically Windows could do it too
I think OS X has a significant advantage, as DisplayPDF is built into Quartz - in fact, the first Google hit for "displaypdf quartz" includes this : Mac OS X is based on hardware accelerated DisplayPDF (Quartz). OS native hardware acceleration always helps.. I can remember using Digital's X11 implementation on VAX/VMS 5 (a looooong time ago). It didn't do many things quickly, but as it had Display Postscript built in, it displayed Postscript files quickly!
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Windows Installer is at least partly to blame. The concept sounds great: you declare in a database everything you want to install, the installer core service decides whether a suitable version of each component is already installed and if not, to install it. But we really want to do it transactionally, in an all-or-nothing fashion, and allow low-privileged users to run elevated installs, so we first check all the versions and write a script, then we pass that script to a high-privileged service to execute it. This means we touch every key file already present once, to determine whether it needs to be updated. We still have to try to find the file, even if it isn't there. (This takes a non-zero amount of time.) Any file we do overwrite we have to back up, so we can roll back the install if it fails. Files that are in use have to be installed somewhere else and we call MoveFileEx so they can be overwritten at the next reboot. So we have some idea what went wrong when the install doesn't work properly, we have to log everything we do. It's common now to log everything - hey, we're not short of disk space - so the logging takes longer and longer. It turns out that building a component out of multiple files doesn't work very well - repair checks only the key file, so if any other file in the component is missing or the wrong version, the repair won't pick it up. The solution is to make each file a separate component. This seriously bloats the registry for tracking components, adds more logging to detail each component installed, and causes more file checks overall. Files that don't have a version can be hashed to see if the file is already present and potentially save a file copy operation. However, if the file is in a CAB, such as the embedded CAB, its data will have to be read anyway - CAB compression is on a whole-archive basis, not per-file like ZIP. Really all hashing saves is if an entire CAB can be eliminated. It's really for avoiding downloading CABs from the internet or over the network, if using an HTTP MSI or an administrative share. However, MD5 over a large file takes quite some time, particularly because Windows Installer is stupid enough to try to map the whole file in one contiguous block of virtual address space. (See Wine equivalent[^]). Because components, not resources, are tracked, it's important to keep the
Interesting read - thanks for posting it.
Mike Dimmick wrote:
allow low-privileged users to run elevated installs
That's the thing I try and write software not to need if I can possibly help it - developing for a hghly locked down corporate environment where admin privileges are as rare as hens teeth also encourages that :-)
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
A *very good thing* - Ubuntu has a similar approach with "sudo".
sudo and UAC are not trivial for normal users. We techies get it, most people don't. UAC also pops up when I least expect it. sudo never pops up, it appears when I explicitly do something I know requires higher rights. Mac OS X isn't perfect but the "enter password" security happens mainly when you are expecting it (installations, changing admin settings etc.) Almost every Vista box I've used has had UAC turned off by now. A shame, but Vista botched it. Hopefully they get it right in Windows 7
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
Such as?
Other people have done it for me. Google will give you many more lists and rants and articles. More than I remember seeing for Windows XP. Coding horror Vista inconsistencies[^]. Chris Pirillo's feedback.[^] More from Chris[^]. Paul Thurrot's[^].
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
Every software product has that [Smile]
Not all software is your main operating system. Vista just needed some finishing work, it seems to have a good core.
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
the integrated search simply rocks
I'm glad they finally put it in but there are better implementations out there in 3rd party Windows apps and even Spotlight on Mac OS X (which isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Took them till Leopard to get application launching right.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A
I feel your pain with Vista... but I suspect alot of the UAC prompts are caused by legacy software rather than the OS itself - because there's tons more badly written 3rd-party apps on windows than there is for mac its going to take a while for things to settle down. UAC hardly ever displays for me after the first few days of install inconsistent UI is my biggest gripe in vista.