In a change that will probably affect almost nobody at all, SQLEditor is now being distributed with a zip file rather than a dmg as the default download.
Why?
- Zip files are simpler to create
- It prevents the problem of the app being run from the dmg
- Safari handles zip downloads really nicely
- Disk images created in 10.6 tend to loose their background images in 10.5
That last problem is quite significant, because most of the friendliness of the dmg is the background image; if you loose that, you might as well have a zip file.
There are some benefits from dmg files:
- They have the background image and the drag to applications directory install
- DMG files can be smaller
- DMG files are handy to store
But then if you loose the first point anyway, it might not be worth bothering.
Now there are excellent tools like DMG Canvas for creating cross platform disk images that work fine and keep their background images, but I began to wonder if it was worth the effort for SQLEditor. Were the benefits of the background image sufficient to make up for the trouble?
Various notables including John Gruber, Panic and Sofa recommend or use zip files, so it’s becoming more popular. (The Mac App Store uses pkg but it’s a different story altogether)
The change isn’t actually as significant as it seems anyway, because SQLEditor has been available in both zip and dmg formats for some months now. The release process automatically builds both zip and dmg format archives and uploads them at the end of the build release process. The change is really just that the website links now point to the zip instead of the dmg. (And if you really want the dmg you can change zip to dmg in the download link and get a dmg)
Enjoy!
Or take absolutely no notice of it at all 🙂