Safari certainly has been a huge hit with Mac users around the world and we
are very appreciative about the support, enthusiasm and feedback from everyone.
While most of the great features are pretty obvious - performance, Goggle
search,
SnapBack and bookmark collection to name a few, there's one subtle but extremely
important feature that is worth describing further.
Simplifying the download
experience was a top goal of Safari. Downloading should be as simple as clicking
a link and in most cases, there should be no need to launch helper applications
or answer bizarre questions on where and how to download, etc. People shouldn't
need to know about different encoding, archiving and compression formats.
To accomplish this, Safari works in concert with "Internet-Enabled
Disk Image"
technology introduced in Mac OS X v10.2.3. An internet-enabled disk image is
one that can clean up after it is downloaded. For example, if you
have a Mac OS X application packaged as a single icon, stored in one of these
disk images, all you need to do is download it in Safari and the image will
be downloaded, decompressed, and the application package will be copied out
of the disk image and placed in your default download folder (usually your
desktop). The disk image is automatically mounted, unmounted and put in the
trash.
If the disk image includes an installer package, you will be prompted that
the download requires installation at which point you can continue and the
Apple Installer will be invoked (we don't run downloaded apps directly ever).
The net result is very simple. Click a download link and if the download image
is Internet-enabled, you'll be left with the very thing you wanted to download
exactly where you expect without having to answer a bunch of questions or crumbs
of temporary files left all over the place.
Creating an Internet-Enabled Disk Image is very simple. A detailed technote
can be found here. There's a command line utility called hdiutil that
has options to set the flags to make one of these images and we hope and
expect that all Mac downloads will embrace this
new format, simplifying downloads for everyone on the Mac.
[Ken Bereskin's Radio Weblog]
