I am not a programmer, nor will I ever claim to be one. One thing that annoys me about shipping products for download is that developers do not take advantage of the fantastic opportunity afforded to them by Apple’s advanced compression options for disk images.
I was on my honeymoon last year, and Garmin’s RoadTrip software, at version 2.0, had some serious bugs. I really needed to download the 2.0.1 update. I was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a cruise ship with SLOW internet access. I consider it a modern miracle to have internet access on the ship ANYWAYS, but I digress. After downloading the large disk image, I ran it through DropDMG‘s bzip2 compressor and shaved something like 30MB off of the disk image file. If Garmin had done that in the first place, they’d have cut down on the internet time I had to burn downloading the damn thing, plus they would save a little on their bandwidth costs. I’m sure that 30MB per download of their Mac software is negligible, but still worth taking into consideration. Bottom line is that there’s no good reason to ship a disk image that mounts as read/write, nor is there a good reason to ship a non-compressed DMG. Devs: prove me wrong.
Now, some of you losers still running OS X 10.3 might be complaining about not being able to use bzip2 compressed DMGs. Lucky for you, Apple still supports legacy zlib compressed DMGs. And if you’re running 10.0 and need an ADC compressed image, you need to figure out how the hell you got to this website in the first place and SERIOUSLY re-evaluate your technological budget.
Now, this part of my rambling is going to be an unsolicited whoring of myself for Michael Tsai over at C-Command. Not only is DropDMG one of my favorite utilities for DMG archival and processing, his other big product SpamSieve is quite possibly the most brilliantly written third-party spam filters ever made. It is essentially seamless with OS X Mail, and support for all of his products is completely first-rate. No other spam filter has ever worked as well as his for my use, and I cannot thank him enough for saving my inbox.
So, developers, please save your customers time and support a wonderful member of your community: process your DMGs properly through DropDMG before posting them for download. I’ll be happy, and isn’t that really all that matters?