Native Apple Mac OS X Installer

I just kicked the tyres of new OS X Mac installer that Scott is working on. It’s really nice!

We’ve been running Mac’s as desktops for a long time – when we started it was a bit unusual but it’s become more the norm – these days every second laptop is a Mac. While actual usage of Mac’s for servers I think continues to be a little unusual it’s now a very common choice for people’s desk top machines.

So we’re making a native Mac installer – here’s a few screenshots:

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When you double click on the Iguana icon it runs a little management icon which shows that Iguana is running and gives a convenient way to stop/start it and open up the dashboard:

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We’re working through where to put the Iguana logs and configuration files with the installer. My desire is that they should go into a different place like ~/Library/iNTERFACEWARE Iguana/ to make it easy to upgrade Iguana – it should simply be a matter of dragging and dropping a new Iguana icon into the application directory.

The process is helping us think through better how the windows installer for Iguana should work. One small problem with Windows is that windows makes writing installers more difficult since the operating system has the nasty property that any process can open and exclusively lock a file and just break an upgrade. We’re planning on rethinking how our windows installer works so that it could work along what I think are best practices for a production installation of Iguana:

http://help.interfaceware.com/kb/best-practice-production-deployment-for-iguana

This is great. I love the start / stop in the menu bar. I’m assuming this won’t work with multiple instances? It’s become more rare lately, but I have run multiple instances on my Mac when working on remote management tools.

M.R. McBee

As of now the plan is to only support a single instance of Iguana with this little application. You’ll still be able to use a tarball and do things with custom installation just like you can use manual installation on windows.

We could go beyond that I guess but I think I would place greater priority on systemizing other aspects of things I think of as best practice like making it possible to move the logs directory from within Iguana without needing to edit the configuration file and copy files and have Iguana update the maintenance expiry automatically, have a upgrade triggered from within Iguana itself etc. It would be nice if we could reduce the effort associated with this type routine maintenance.

Incidentally Jon Scalise has implemented a new API for setting the license. Hopefully we should have that come out in the next point release…