---
title: WWDC2004 Session 403
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-403
---

# WWDC2004 Session 403

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en welcome to a session for three regarding the mac OS x install application my name is Jean PFE dad and I work at Apple in the installation and setup group we write applications like the installer application the software update application and the setup assistant which is the first application you see after installing the us once you reboot the machine first I have a question for you how many of you are familiar with creating installation packages okay maybe sixty percent seventy percent so for those of you who are not familiar with creating packages I'm going to start by giving you an overview of what are the options available for you and Mac os10 for those of you who are familiar after the overview we'll talk about some of the new and updated features that we are bringing to you in Tiger most importantly we'll talk about installation plugins and distributions then we'll talk about how you can create compatible packages that will install all the way from 10 dot 12 tiger and at the end we'll talk about where you can find some more documentation about all the Seas so there are two types of installations that are available to you on Mac OS 10 the first one drag and drop installs this is the simplest way to deliver your application to your users in addition to that apple also provides you with an application called package maker to create packages and the Installer application to install them on the user's machine so let's start with drag-and-drop what are the advantages well the advantages to users are obvious it's only one file one application bundle that your user can just drag to wherever it wants in the file system very simple very simple to install it's also very easy to remove the users the user can just grab the application bundle and drag it to the trash the advantages for you there is absolutely no complex installation instructions to write it's very simple process now of course there also some edges of using a dragon to install all the supporting files that your application may need like additional frameworks or things like that will have to be located in your application bundle you cannot put them anywhere else on the system because the bundle will be dragging one location only by the user your application will need to handle any read me any license agreement it will also have to check for proper configuration when it went when it's launched again you know you have no way to do additional checking now if any of these of these disadvantages are real prize for you you can actually use the package base installation so our installer supports custom installations the user can go into the custom install panel and select or unselect packages as you want you can also check for proper cut proper configuration you can check for system you can also check for volume to make sure that the targeted volume has the right version of the US for example you can run pre and post install scripts or tools these are run before you copy all the files and after you copy all the files you can also perform installation all across the file system anywhere you want now I want to mention something about this we recommend that whenever it's possible you avoid installing it / system the reason for that is because some of you may be familiar with the mac to mac upgrade feature a view of you install tiger how many of you have installed tiger so you may have noticed that one of the first panel that you see in the setup assistant is a migration panel that ask you if you want to migrate from another machine or from another partition when we do this migration we do not carry over files that were installed into / system or to be more precise we do it but we do it on a case for case basis so if we don't know about your file it will not be migrated all the features of the Installer it will handle authorization for you if your application needs to restart a ninja log out we will ask the user to restart a to log out we will also do the optimizing system performance section of the installer which is the we will run the prevailing tool to pre-ban your executable if you're installing an application we will register it with launch services and we will also allow you to provide some customizable parts of the UI namely the Welcome panel the background image and a localized read me or license agreement so how do you work how what is an installer package so first and foremost an installer package contains the files that you want to install this is what we call the payload the payload is just a tax archive in addition to that attacks a package a package bundle contains a catalog the catalog is a bill of materials it's an indexed list of the files that are contained in your archive in addition to that you provide a description file that gives us the title and the description of the package also you provide some flags that tells us how to behave you know do you want some memorization and you know things like that do you want to follow symlinks then you also provide all the UI parts of the of the installation process the background image to read me the license agreement the welcome screen you also provide the check tools that will check the system to make sure that your package can be installed on and same thing for the volume the installation check and volume check tool and then you provide a collection of scripts that you may want to be run before you install the files or after you install the files we make a difference between pre-install and pre upgrade depending of depending if you're doing an upgrade or an install obviously now you can create as many packages as you want and then you can group them together in the UI by using a meta package an installer meta package structure is very similar to a package except the does not contain any payload it's only purpose is to group things together in the UI the way you list those packages the packages that belong to this meta package is by adding your key in the info that TVs that will contain you know the the list of packages now areata package also contains some UI sections the check tools and the different scripts so how do you create a package you create a package using package maker package maker is installed on your system as part of the Xcode tools its installed in developer application utilities and you can run package maker as a as an application or you can also run it as a command-line tool that you can include the new build scripts as it is today on your CV on the tiger CD that you have the package maker is a very simple version of the application it only creates very simple packages you will most likely have to go and edit the file that gets created in order to support some of the more advanced feature of the installer however we are actively working on package maker and we really hope to deliver to you a much better application of package maker for GM so in package maker you provide the root directory of your software you specify the different installation flags that you want to use and you give us the name of your package description and then the location of all the additional files have the ring me in the license agreement etc on that food package maker will create a package that PKG bundle that you will distribute to your users that package will be installed on the user's machine using the apple installer which is located in application utilities the installer has been shipping in every single versions of Mac OS 10 it's always available using the familiar with it it's very easy to use so now I would like to introduce you to Jack Matthew the filthier of installation and he's also the person at Apple who made a career out of creating installer packages Thank about John Pierre my car is an Isis feels like a drive a Toyota so not quite as a much not quite filled so as a jean pierre mentioned package makers a really simple application the things that you need in order to use package maker our first of all a route and you can think of this as as / and let's just take a look at our route here whoops so our route contains applications and then our application and one of the reasons we might want to use a package based installers because we're installing more than one thing on the file system otherwise we'd want to use a drag install so we also install something into library application support so in addition to the rude we also have this package resources folder and it contains let's say a post-processing script that we were going to run it also includes L proj folders that contain are localized resources so in this case I've got an English read me and in honor of jean-pierre we've got a friend shell proj the French read me and so now we can then begin actually making our package so let's go ahead and launch package maker really simple UI so title let's call it my application version 1 point 0 and description description is what appears in in custom installs this package is included as part of a meta package this is good okay so files this is where we select our route so where is that well I've got it right here there's our route resources here are the resources and info this is where you can set up some of the meta install flags in this particular case we're installing an application and something into application support so you're going to want to have admin admin privileges otherwise it's not going to work if you have a really restricted user that's running the package so that's actually all there is to it so go ahead and create package and we'll call it my apps pkg and you'll go ahead and put that on the desktop tada that's it so we can go ahead and launch the package that's all there is to it and I'm going to turn the stage back over to jump here thank you jack so this is very simple you know there's not much to it this is very useful so now we'd like to talk to you about our new features so first what do we get ideas for new features well we mostly get them from you you send us feedback we see we meet you at WWDC you report bugs often the more announcements requests and bugs and sometimes there are real new features and we listen to what you have to say we also listen to people like Jack who create packages at Apple who create packages for the US and also for applications there are great source of information for us and we are please keep the feedback coming so what have we done in tiger so here are some of the new features that might be a fan of interest for you pal version checking some of you may be familiar with bundle version checking which is what prevents the installer from overriding a newer version of a bundle on the user's desk we have extended that to files the reason for that is because some files are not part of a bundle things like fonts for example and currently what our installer would be doing is H we just go and install an older version of the salt over a newer one so this is bad so we decided to address that it's worked in a very simple way for every file that you want to check we give you a hook where you can provide your own tool and basically tell us whether or not the fashion you've replaced we are going to provide some standard ways some standard version checks for some files multiple CD installations that's a request that we we heard last year that a lot of people wanting to be able to actually have the money to install to be able to handle multiple cds or multiple dvds so we we now have implemented that it will be available through distribution scripts you will hear about distributions later minimum you are installation so this is in order to provide a better solution for automated installs we now allow the package writer to specify if some panels in the Installer should be skipped we also provide in for some of the panels will provide a minimal UI which means that we do not force the user to always answer a question in the Installer panel we can we can assume certain replies so it's useful for automated install it will also be available through distribution scripts application selection one of the panel that you have in the store today is a target selection where we list all the volumes that you have on your machine this is great when you install in the US but really when you deliver you have a new version of your application to the user you want you want to upgrade the existing one so what application selection is is a replacement for volume selection and instead of disk you will see older versions of your application on the user's machine and the user can say this is the one I want to upgrade and then we have two more features that i would like to call two more features that i would like to go into more details and for that i'm going to call to engineers in my team and we're going to start with plugins installed plugins and i would like to call chris ran thank you jump here so I'm going to talk my name is Christopher Ryan and I work on the setup and installation team and I'm going to talk about installer plugins so Oh dollar plugin so I'm going to talk about why we have installer plugins what they are and how they're used how to create an installer plug in some requirements when they should be used and when they shouldn't be used as well as some demos so let's get started why do we have installed plugins so jean-pierre mentioned there are many ways to customize your installers experience you ever read me a license a welcome panel as well as a custom background but we've been hearing requests from many developers that you want to do more you want to do things we haven't thought of you want registration serialization maybe even a summary or conclusion at the end of the install and so we're going to provide you some plug a plug-in support so you can do this so what are they they are customizable section in the Installer similar to how you see the readme and license and the target flex panel they're provided by developers inside your packages or distributions they are loadable code which can have nibs as well as other resources you need but the best show you these plugins we're going to bring Jack Matthew up to show you a quick demo Thanks well Chris so again this is just best scene so let's go ahead and launch a package that is using a couple of custom plugins so the first thing you might notice here is on the Left there's some this some more stuff so let's just go ahead and continue on to one of these custom plugins here's a registration plugin this is the what we call a section and we're going to go into more details in a moment but let's go ahead and fill this out and then we're going to enter our serial number and you might notice that the continue button is grayed out until we enter our extremely secure product key and here's here's a second pain so you'll notice that the bullet over here stayed on registration but this view here changed so let's go ahead and ruin this disc and incidentally or your various plugins can talk to each other through a shared dictionary so here we go and we're done yay and look at this this is an example of a late breaking news plugin you might want to just give someone the latest information off of your own webpage just something we were able to make really quick so you'll see over here breaking news and oh yeah in case you didn't notice the Installer windows resizable knowledge and that is a package with two custom plugins back over to Chris thank you jack as you can see you can customize the installers experience how do we do this so we have an Xcode template now in Tiger which will create a very basic plug and you can use to extend we have a new framework called the Installer plugins framework which contains two new concepts that Jack alluded to the Installer section and installer pain I'm going to go over those in a second so here's the window that you saw that Jack showed on the screen with the late-breaking news plugin each plug-in contains one section so here's the registration section it's provided by the registration plugin it also contains two panes and the late-breaking news section contains one pain so you can have one or more pains per section so in the Installer section you can customize customize a few things one is the title this can be either dynamic or static so you can decide the title at runtime you can also decide whether to actually show the section or not for registration for example you may not want to show the registration section if your product is already registered on that machine also you can decide the panel ordering at runtime from your section so here's an example here's the example registration section and the title which you can customize is highlighted so how do I do this you can customize the title of your installer section using the Installer section title key in your info fewest file and this is this is localized you can pila strings file also you can do this at runtime by using the Installer sections title method in the Installer session subclass and a subclass in installous section you need to provide the NS principle and that's principal class key in your info.plist so the Installer knows exactly which installer section class to load and then we also have a very important method called should load which allows you to decide at runtime whether your section should load in the installs you are not so here's a quick example of should load method in this example we have a section that should only run on a machine with a with one gigabyte of memory as you notice you can use this control or any other system libraries to decide whether your section should load or not and it checks for one gigabyte of memory and if there's one gigabyte of memory it returns desk the Installer load the section otherwise it's not loaded so the real meat is the is the view and what you see on the screen so you can customize this using an installer pain the Installer pane provides a title just shown here in the top provides the content view which is the content area your custom view to the customer as well as some slow control whether you can move forward or backward and whether they can press to go back or continue buttons here so to customize these using the Installer pain to customize the title there's there's an installer pain subclasses title method which you need to override the content view you either set up the content view outlet in your nib which which is pretty obvious in the Xcode template if you look at it as well as you can also return it dynamically using the content view method in your installers pain subclass also to note that Jack showed you that the Installer window is now resizable so it's very important that you stick with the minimum size of 4 18 by 3 30 for your pains but allow it to resize correctly and look correct in a resize environment so how do customized installers flow control the Installer pains have a next pain outlet which you can decide which the next pain for your for the current pain is in the nib or you can do it at runtime using the next pain method and there are also some entering and exited will enter will exit did enter did exit as well as a very important should exit method which gets called when the user clicks to continue or go back button on your pain so you can decide whether you want to exit the pain or not at runtime so here's an example of that so in this example you may want to warn the user that they have to that they might have we might have to send their registration over the Internet and so when the user clicks the continue button we're going to the install is going to call the should exit pain method on your pain and you're going to return no and show an alert warning them that we're going to send their registration and when the alerts complete there's the Installer pains go to next pain method which you call to advance to the next pain so how to use your plugin you have to put your plug-in in the content plugins directory of your package or distribution and you also have to accompany it with the Installer sections plist file which you'll find in the Xcode template which defines exactly where your section fits amongst all the other built-in sections in the Installer here the registration section a reg registration plugins section will get loaded between the license and the target section and the Installer it's also important to note that we've actually turned we've actually using this technology in our own installer and each of the Installer sections our installer plugins so let's show you how to create one of these Jack we really really high if theres the mic we're going to make a very simple plug-in it's going to be the hello world of install our plugins here so since I'm not very fast at typing I've got some pre-canned code here we'll just go ahead and put that in our pace board and we're launch Xcode and as Chris mentioned this is a standard template it's really easy to find so X codes launched we're going to go ahead and create a new project and then you'll see a section called standard apple plugins so let's go ahead and find that where is it standard apple plugins install our plug-in and we're going to go ahead and put that on desktop okay so first let's go ahead and look at our code here so you'll see that this is a part of the template here this is the the title method it just returns the the pain title and I go ahead and paste in this code and this is going to believe it or not just going to make us a very very very simple basic plugin this should exit pain method that Chris mentioned this is going to get called by the Installer when you click the continue or go back button and we're going to use this to present a goodbye message before the user actually is able to go to the next plugin so we'll go ahead and save that and then we're also going to go into the nib and add some hello world text okay so here's our content view ok save and let's go ahead and build it see what happens okay and I believe we are done so let's look at the god I've got a package ready to go here to take our plug-in just confidence of this okay okay show package contents and here's the contents folder now we're going to need to create a plugins folder inside of contents and so as Chris mentioned it's going to need to contain two things the first is of course your plug-in bundle that you built the other thing is the Installer sections plist file and that determines the order of your plug-in relative to the to the everything else the built-in plugins or any other plugins that you might have so there's that here's our bundle and that should be it now let's go ahead and double-click our package and see what happens now I didn't change the the Installer sections plist file but if we wanted to have our hello world be first we would have done that and we could have made it first continue read me and there you go until let's try to click continue and goodbye and that is it simple thank you jack as you can see it's pretty easy to create an installer plugin so some of the requirements and restrictions on these plugins first of all installed plugins are only available on tiger so if you're making it packaged and you include installer plug in these plugins will be ignored on previous builds what this means is that you shouldn't rely on your plugins for serialization of your application or for registration you should you should use this as a as a helper to get the best user experience to your customers while they're installing also it's important to note that now we have a new feature in the installer and tiger which is multiple CD or disc DVD installs and with this that means that your plugins resources may not be available at all times so it's very important that your plugins do not access their resources or data while they are not currently active or not being methods aren't being called from the Installer on your plugins so with that I'm going to hand it over to Peter Biermann who's going to talk about distribution scripts Peter thank you Chris I'm Peter Baron I work on the installer team with Kristin jean-pierre and some other people I'm going to be talking about distribution script another new feature we have in tiger pretty excited about this it's going to give us some cool new features so distribution scripts are all about controlling the installers user interface I spent a lot of my time advising developers that if they can they should use a drag-and-drop installer but often they can't and it's because they have a more complicated piece of software usually as their software gets more complicated they move into using what we call em packages or meta packages that jean-pierre talked about and when you start using meta packages it gets to be difficult to control the installers you I the good thing about using the installer is that you get a consistent user experience the downside of especially meta packages is it's hard to create that consistent user experience so here's the diagram of the installation package that jean-pierre showed you earlier as you can see there's lots of little files you have to keep track of in particular this section in the middle is all the user interface controlling files lots of flag lots of keywords things have been added over the years when you start to deal with meta packages you have all the same packages and all the same flags they're just scattered everywhere so we've created distribution script distribution scripts take all of those flags and move them into a single file hopefully it makes it easier for you guys to create your packages keep track of how the user interface is going to look when the user is using your installer so how do we do this we're going to use XML and JavaScript we've decided to use XML because it's easy for machines to read and write and because we're using application specific elements it can be easy for humans to read and write we're also using javascript javascript looks like sea but it has a lot of cool features like garbage collection and associative arrays makes some things a lot easier to deal with it's also sandbox inside of the installer application that means you can't read write files you can't go to the network you can't arbitrarily do all sorts of other stuff but it's useful for the installer to actually certain questions about your user interface now a lot of people they hear JavaScript and they get concerned they've heard from their friends who programming Java scripts that it's it's a pain there's a lot of things you have to worry about almost all those things are web browser specific the installer is in a web browser well let you put one in your plug-in so you don't have to worry about any of that how would you start with the distribution script well you'd have a file it can be called anything we've gotten away from those package space filename have to have a DI st extension it ends up in the content subfolder of your package or em package and within the distribution script itself any of the strings you use that our user interface items can actually be he's for the localized strings elsewhere in your package bundle so to take a closer look at distribution scripts here's some of the beginnings of the distribution script vocabulary you can see here there's the first element is installer GUI script this actually is the container elements for all the other elements ease inside the distribution script then we see a title element which within the title elements contained your title your package title and a welcome or read me in license elements these use a file attribute to specify a file located in your package resources much like there are flags for these same things in the current installer package format now things get a little more complicated here we have a package reference element this has an ID attribute that's used to refer to the package reference element elsewhere in the distribution script it also has a kilobytes attribute which will be used by the Installer you I to show how big your packages this particular package finally there's a file URL here for where the Installer framework itself will go and get your package when it comes down to do installing one of the interesting things about this is what you're seeing here is the beginning of the Installer doesn't actually need to look at your packages to present any of the UI it's actually going to try to get as much of this information from you up front and then hand your list of packages to the framework when it's done so when we get to the UI we get to the custom install panel and things get even more interesting here we see a choices outline element this is the beginnings of you setting up what exactly that custom install panel should look like there's two line elements here they refer to two choice elements named app and extra these names can be whatever you want the choice element the first choice element here we've called app it has a title in this case it's not localized it's just right in the distribution script and it also has within it a connection to the package ref element you saw in the previous slide let me do that again with the extras item so you put those two together we end up with a very familiar custom install pal there's nothing on this screen that you can't do yourself currently with packages or n packages but it's a little simpler to do with distribution script and we can throw that all together here's the whole thing all of them come fine you can see the various choice elements line elements how they all are connected to each other so that's what you can do today with a new syntax xml file yeah it sounds great but there's a bunch of cool new things you can do with it for example you can now attach multiple packages to any one choice you can break up your software in any way you want and connect the things to the choices the user sees in the UI completely separately from how you package your software you can attach the same package to different choices you can have you know some app support package that never changes that's attached to all the various things that the user could install you can show the same choice in more than one place you could create a very creative custom install you I where you've got groups of things and well you can use your imagination there and you can enable or select choices based on the user's other selections inside the customization channel and the system configuration now within packages you can do this but it's difficult there are flags and most of it involves packages ruling themselves out because they don't like how machines configure your so on with distribution script it's much more explicit you have very complete control over whether packages enabled or disabled selected or be selected so how do we do that well we have these choice elements I showed you a few seconds ago and the choice elements represent the choices a user can make inside the customization you I the choice elements have attributes like selected enabled and visible and the values of those attributes can be JavaScript expression so here we see again a very simple representation of the custom install panel and let's take a closer look at those two choices a very common idiom is for people to have a nap and some dependent package or they want these two things to be related to each other for example if I deselect the app I want the extras to become deselected and disabled so the user can't install the extras separately from the app I reflect the app the extras become enabled that's so how would we do that using a distribution script here we see the choices outline again that just sets up the outline view and we see our two choices our app and our extras choice in the attributes for the extras choice we have an enabled attribute and a selected attribute the enabled attribute is a JavaScript expression it's choices apps dot selected now that refers back to the chalk to the app choice that's in the middle screen there that choices word there that in that JavaScript expression is actually an object that's provided by the installers runtime that allows you to connect to the attribute to the choices declared in XML these are all the attributes of the choices are dynamic at runtime so when the user checks something you can determine whether checked which one's checked whether it's enabled things like that the selected attribute is a little more complicated in this case we want the user to only be able to select it if the app is selected so that's that first half of that and expression there the other half of it is sort of self-referring what that means is that if the app is selected the value of the selected attribute of the extras is equal to whatever the user wants it to be if the user clicks it it's selected if the user unselected it's deflected and again that choices object is provided by the Installer runtime connects you to all the live state of the various choice elements now there's a couple other objects that we provide in the Installer runtime and I'll talk about those so here we have the JavaScript system object this is a again provided by the installers runtime it contains a bunch of methods and static data about the configuration of the machine it lets you inspect that from your distribution script and it's read-only you can't go into it and change things about the machine you can't say oh the machine has two gigs of RAM now that's not going to be possible but you can use things like CTL you can get the values out of a plist anywhere on the file system and you can use the IO registry find out if your hardware is connected for example here's an example we can set up our application to only be enabled if the machine has 128 megs of ram here you see the enabled attribute of the choice of the app choice it's connected to a JavaScript function that we've named has 128 megabytes and that functions contained within a script element you can have as many of these script elements as you'd like within your distribution script and you can put any javascript you'd like inside these script elements here we have a function that I've written has 128 megs of ram it uses the system dot CTL method to find out how much physical ram the machine has and returns yes or no depending on whether there's enough so that's a pretty quick look at some of the neat things you can do just going to look at more some of the more advanced things we can do with it okay put the clip on too so first let's just go ahead and dive into a package that is using a distribution script and look at something that you've never been able to do before we're really excited about this okay ok so so first off just going over what Peter Peter showed you in the slides you can you can do this again this is a very common idiom say you had a font that needed to go with your with your application and you wanted to provide this kind of optional install here but the fonts no good without the app something like that you can do now now let's look at this this is a little more interesting you'll notice that I clicked on this but see something happened in here so let's go ahead and we'll get the look at this expanded here and you'll see that as I click these items other items become selected finally we can do stuff like this this is great so let's look at another example ok so well this this isn't very interesting is it but let's let's just go ahead for a moment and look at the the code for this this is let me introduce you to the first JavaScript I've ever written literally this took me minutes to figure out it's very very very simple so we have some standard stuff in here like has a welcomed RTF okay fine then we start talking about here the choices the line items that appear and the custom install UI and then we begin to actually accumulate information about each of these choices and a few different other XML tags here first we're saying here here's choice that we're referring to as a its got a title it's called nifty application then we have a choice called be be has a title as well and we're saying that it's enabled you can you can you can select this package but here's another interesting field here start selected what is the default selection state of this of this choice well it's the function so what is this function to well we've gone and embedded some JavaScript here inside of this XML tags as cooking so say you wanted to say your application goes and lays down a cookie file and then on you know subsequent use of an installer you don't want to present that option by default so uneasy install a more reasonable thing happens so simply here I go ahead and use the built-in system object system files file exists to pass and then I guess and give it a pass so let's go ahead and and for fun go ahead and create that pass permission denied I've been denied you have our ways oh oh perhaps we don't okay Oh okay well I assure you that if I had if I had is successful it successfully authorized here that upon second launch of of that package we would have seen that by default that optional item would have been deselected okay so that is a quick demo of distribution scripts and and and the stage back over to here thanks jack we actually tried a lot of this stuff earlier today and something's got to go wrong during the actual presentation so there you have it so if you do these if you work on these there's a couple things you should watch out for both XML and JavaScript are case sensitive if you run into some mysterious problems you're confused try using users in XML lint it's included in the system it'll look through your XML point out any problem you have missing characters missing Flash's things like that one of the most common things you have to watch out for is there's five characters you have to escape and all XML documents that's the left and right angle brackets the single double quote and the ampersand if you decide to write some software or some scripts to create distribution scripts for you instead of doing them by hand you can use a function such as the CF function CF XML create string by escaping entities that's a mouthful but beware that function has a bug in 10 dot 3 it doesn't make it very useful but it is fixed in the tiger build that you all have you can also use similar functions in your favorite scripting languages so distribution script this was just a teaser we hope to buy the GM version of Tiger have what we're going to call it package translators that will look at your existing end packages and build you a distribution script so you'll have something to start with there's also a session download that's available on connect on apple com for this session that includes a documentation a test app to play with distributions and some sample distribution script unfortunately the installers that is in the tiger build that you all have doesn't currently deal with distribution scripts were in the process of building them up and adding more support for them so now is a great time for us to hear your feedback about it it's still under construction please play with it and send your feedback to installer disk ash feedback at group apple com and now the man you've been listening to all through the session jack is going to come up and give his presentation on building compatible packages yet oh well oh my god okay so let me formally introduce myself here my name is jack massie and my team at Apple are apples and can we get the slides on please all right okay so my team are apples package developers were like you guys we work on the OS install the OS updates the ilife applications the pro applications such as Final Cut DVD Studio Pro a bunch of other little random small updates like security updates we also help keep software update running and we work on the windows installers as well so I'm here to talk about compatibility we've seen some really great new features here today but if you're like us you have to deliver software to people that have older machines so let me just go over what I'm going to talk about here first of all making packages that work with both 10.1 as well as tiger we're going to talk about some of the things that have happened to the package format over time go over some features that you may or may not be aware of we're going to we're going to talk about if your application or if your package really must use some of these new features that we've been talking about here that if someone gets a hold of data on an older system that the the right thing happens and then we're going to talk about packages that are a little bit more complicated that use things like custom install and a mixture of some of these new and old features and kind of how to get the get the best make some compromises and deliver something that's going to work for the maximum number of people so first off simple packages what do I mean by that packages that basically just install your bits a little more than that maybe they run a pre or post processing script so the first thing to understand is that a package that you built on 10.1 is still going to run when you launch it on tiger and similarly if you build your package using package maker on tiger it's going to run on 10.1 and if you need a little bit more functionality in your script the installation check and volume check scripts as well as the pre and post flight scripts still work in Tiger and work all the way back to 10.1 so let's now talk about some of the stuff that's happened to the package format over time so 10.1 something called my app PKG as you can see especially in the in the scripts up there Maya my app is attached to a lot of these resource names dump that in 10.2 and 10.2 packages became a real NS bundle and they have things like an in soapy list and all the resources inside of that package have a consistent name this is good this is good because well first of all for users if they rename that package it works it used to break consistent file names are really useful for things like automation and Apple localizes its software into 15 different languages a nice little bonus that happened was that by separating the meta install flags from the things like the description and title now we no longer have some of these met install flags accidentally localized for us so that was a nice little thing additionally the payload and catalog file that is the bill of materials and the archives changed in file name only so under the hood they're the same exact file so what package maker does for you is create symlinks that when you run that package on the older system it's tricked into the right thing happening so some some features and changes here and 10.2 we added a feature called fine files and fine files is useful for updating your application in a location that the user may have moved it to users extensively and all the OS updates because we only ship parts of each application we don't rishe if mail when we want to update it just just a little bit that changed so so we use it quite a lot we depend on it we also added the brac the background pictures feature which allows you to include custom artwork for the installer to display and in 10.3 we made that slime files feature a little bit easier to use and another notable thing for a package authors here is that we enhanced the follow symlinks feature so that if those thin links point to things on other devices that it works and on Tiger 44 application package developers there are more features that apply then to to you guys than any other OS release so I also wanted to mention some some things that you should be aware of if your application has to work on 10.2 or earlier now these are these are things that we've fixed in 10 points3 but things to keep in mind and we just like to mention really quickly here so first of all when you make your route make it relative from / in other words if you are creating an applique if you are installing an application your route should look like root and then applications and then your app this is as opposed to just slow capas root and changing the default location inside of package maker it's actually gets around a few little edge case bugs and especially important if you're using the fine files feature the what you expected would happen might not happen if you don't do that additionally make sure that in your route the permissions are correct should be you know 1775 for your route and and and and so on this is because there's a bug where on upgrade installs the state of the override permission flag is ignored so you reinstall the packages second time it's going to make the permissions be whatever was in your route which might not be what you want additionally meta packages do not run the installation check tool so simply include that logic inside of a packages installation gentle and again all the stuff works in 10 3 and integra so Tiger only packages you need to use the distribution scripts you need to use plugins you want to make sure that if someone gets ahold of that on on a 10 3 or earlier system that they're not able to install that package because remember it the 10.3 and earlier don't understand what a distribution script is so what do you do so you include an installation check tool that is going to exit with an error value and then on Tiger the distribution script is going to take precedence so you put your real requirements inside of your distribution script for your 10 for your tiger or later customers and on the older systems installation check gets run and it just is its what's with an error and one nice thing about this is that it doesn't require any special strings files it's going to use a generic error message built-in to install or so it's going to be localized for all languages as you can see here that just makes it with the value 96 very very simple it's just with its five and six sets so packages that use some more advanced features and are still compatible so as I mentioned before you can include a distribution script as well as installation check and volume check scripts the installation check and volume check scripts can of course meet the requirements for your 10-3 customers and the distribution script it's going to get run on tiger and you can take advantage of some of the more subtle controls like the default selection state for example probably you some of you've seen this even if the installation check and volume check script meet your needs you should also or you can also include a distribution script and on tiger systems it's going to get rid of this user interface so distribution scripts again are a place where a custom install is is when we talk about customers all we talk about distribution scripts so there are a few things to keep in mind here a package or meta package is a line item in custom install for 10.3 and earlier you're going to have to package around this now there's nothing that says that you can't make a little bit more subtle behavior in 10 point or tiger and and have a slightly different user experience there's nothing wrong with that and also keep in mind that the check scripts can only skip packages can this package be installed at all or not and again you can't affect the default selection state so moving on to file version checking file version checking provides a really nice framework for you to check check versions of files now if you really have to check the version of a file there's nothing that prevents you today from taking a badge of the pre and post white folks you run your own code and do the right thing it's more effort but hey you can you can still do it multi CD installation is another great new feature now on tiger you can use you can use distribution scripts to make everything happen and and have that nice user to transfer tiger customers and for pre tiger customers you can simply include extra meta packages on each CD that guide the user into installing for example you know install me first dime package and stolen second dub and package install my third doesn't package the important thing to remember here is that you don't actually have to repackage your bits but pkgs are the same thing you're just including this extra little thing that that make it work now install our plugins as Chris alluded to the Installer the pre tiger installer ignores plug so you know you can include the plug-in and will run for tiger customers and what we recommend that you do is if that UI is really important to move it into your application and on first launch display it this is you know a really obvious use for these plugins is some sort of product key or serial is a serialization now you should keep in mind that someone can always go in from either the command line or you know third-party third-party tools and just pluck the contents out of your package it's not secure it's it's not going to be secure in that way it's not a real gateway for copy protection so you should move that kind of stuff into your app anyways that said here's a screenshot this is the final cut express installer and you can see some user interface that kind of looks like it's part of the Installer it's not it's it's own application we don't recommend that you do this but it is possible this particular example use the volume check hook and the installer is just running an executable so your executable can be as clever as it needs to be to kind of pretend that it's a part of the Installer again don't do this if you can avoid it there are a number of edge case bugs it just doesn't integrate well so just summarize what I've talked about some of the things that you should you should remember to take away from this so there grabbed a compatibility packages that you made will still work packages that you made in Titans that you make and tiger can can still work on older versions of the OS and this is all true if you use package maker as a starting point now it doesn't have a lot of features hopefully we can add those over time but still use it as a starting point that's going to create the basic structure of a package that's going to be compatible now as you saw in the 10.1 a package diagram there are a lot of other little names attached to the the various resources with the exception of preflight and post flights so if you use pre-flight and post flight across the board it's going to work everywhere and finally you can use a mixture of both some of the new features we've talked about and the old teachers together all in the same package and it's going to get you something that'll basically work out for you so at this point I'm going to turn the stage back up with jean-pierre Thank lot thank you so where to find documentation well you can find documentation in two places let me start with the second one on that slide of the software distribution document this does not refer to the distribution script that we talked about today this is a document that we have that explains how to create packages and on how to use package maker this is actually on a website you can go ahead and download it it's very useful explains all the slides you need for the tea list but that's for Panther for tender three packages we will expand it to include some of the tiger features but it's not it's not been updated yet now we have a session download connected apple com if you go to the session for three you will find something that contains all the example that we showed you today you will find a simple example of a file version checking and how it works some documentation you will also find a folder called install plugins that will contain the plugins that we showed you today and the sources and the project file for xcode and you will also find in there a distribution folder which contains the distribution test app remember that distributions do not work with the tiger installer right now so you need to use the distribution test app and submit some of the examples that you were shown today as well so thank you for coming for this session we're not going to have a Q&A and I would like to call the people in my group back on stage including a Jonathan sugar and al dual are in solitary