Ölbaum’s Delirium

1. A compressed DMG does not need to be zipped, gzipped, binned, sitted or hqxed.

2. Zipping a DMG is no proper way of dealing with a web server misconfiguration (yes, Wikipedia is wrong, sometimes). Configuring the MIME type to application/x-apple-diskimage or application/octet-stream is.

3. An uncompressed DMG does not need to be zipped, gzipped, binned, sitted or hqxed. An uncompressed DMG does not need to exist. An uncompressed DMG needs to be converted into a compressed DMG.

4. A DMG is suposed to be downloaded from a modern computer, not from a VAX. Therefore the file name does not need to be 8.3 fashion or stripped from spaces, capitals or ‘special characters’. If it makes your life easier, replacing spaces with dashes (not underscores) is OK.

5. It is nice to include the version number in the download file name (separated from the rest by a space or a dash).

If you are a Mac developer and have been directed to this page, it’s probably an invitation to improve the user-experience in the very first phase of your customer’s dealings with your software.