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Product Containers

Whether you devise a manual install or a managed install (introduced in “Overview of Software Delivery”) for your product, in general you need to place your product into a container. A container is a file-based enclosure for a product, which facilitates the product’s delivery to a user’s computer. To deliver your product to your users, you may use a transport (delivery vehicle) such as optical media or the Internet. Figure 2-1 illustrates the preferred delivery solution for products in Mac OS X.

Disk images are the preferred container for software products on Mac OS X. They allow you to group a set of files in a compact format that is easily handled by users. These enclosures are easily transported across a network because they appear as a single file. To access the contents of a disk image, a user double-clicks it in the Finder, which opens a standard Finder window showing the disk image’s contents. Compressed disk images allow you to use delivery vehicles—space-limited optical media or bandwidth-strapped networks—more efficiently.

The best container for delivering a product through the Internet is an Internet-enabled disk image. These containers are automatically opened and disposed of. Users need only move the product to a convenient location. See “Manual Installs” for more information.

The following sections describe how to place a product on a disk image and how to configure a disk image to provide a streamlined install experience when it’s downloaded from a network, such as the Internet or an intranet.

Contents:

Creating a Disk Image
Internet-Enabling a Disk Image
Adding a License Agreement to a Disk Image

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