SJS's Journal: Bad developers!

I have a spreadsheet in Appleworks that I'd like to give out to a few people. Appleworks won't save it in an "open" format, but I can export it to a Microsoft Excel file. Alas, that incurs some minor corruption in some of the formulas. Since I don't have Microsoft Excel on my system (any of 'em), I can't load it up in that to fix 'em.

The folks I want to give this spreadsheet to generally use OpenOffice. As this spreadsheet started life as a StarOffice document, I figured having the up-to-date version in the Microsoft Excel format and the original in the StarOffice format would provide enough information to correct the corruption due to the exporting of this file to Microsoft Excel.

It seems OpenOffice doesn't read StarOffice files.

Bad developers! No biscuit!

Okay, I suppose I can install OpenOffice long enough to do the fixup, with the added bonus of being able to provide the spreadsheet in an "open" format. Since I'm using a Mac, the recommendation is to use NeoOffice.

So I go to download NeoOffice. They want a donation. I want to try before I buy, so I skip that bit. It's in a DMG, yay! Mount... and it's a freakin' PKG installer. WTF? Well, maybe it'll let me install it in /tmp or something. No joy... it demands the Administrator password.

Bad developers! No biscuit!

There's zero reason for an _application_ to require the Administrator password. I consider an application installation process that requires an Administrator password -- especially on the Mac, where run-from-the-DMG-file is almost a standard -- to be a sign of incompetence, arrogance, or carelessness on the part of the developers. Laziness is a virtue, but only sometimes.

And they wanted a donation?

No way. Not until they demonstrate a little professionalism and provide me, the user, a reasonable installation process.

Of course, a reasonable soul might point out that there's nothing wrong with a PKG installer, since Apple ships the PKG installer builder tool as part of the "standard" development suite. And they'd be half-right... the problem with PKG tools is that it doesn't do the right thing and allow the user to choose where and how to install an application (no matter what the developer does or doesn't do). Apple developers dropped the ball here.

Bad developers! No biscuit!

Sometimes folks wonder why "the average users" get so annoyed at developers. This is why. We have a tendency to take reasonable choices away from the end-user, instead of building our tools (especially our installation tools) to preserve the user's sense of control over the hardware that they've paid for and use on a daily basis.