Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Football Manager 2007: the worst Mac installer ever

I love Football Manager (previously Championship Manager) and the lure of a £29.99 -> £19.99 price cut was just too tempting. It is also worth noting that I am studying for my finals so any temptation is taken!

Football Manager is a Mac/PC double release on the same CD which is really nice and now I get to play it on my Intel Mac which is even better! Football Manager 2006 was a drag and drop installation but 2007 is soo spectacular that I have screenshotted the process to preserve its glory.

Hrm... no drag and drop here... oh my!


Okay, so this opens up a Terminal window which launches a Java application... [you may be interested to know that setup.jar is 434.9MB]


Oh my goodness! Why do the buttons look like that?!


What do you mean choose the installation type? Are those Windows installer icons? What is the refund policy....


It sits like this for a minute and I do wonder what it is doing...


Here we go, some kind of visual feedback. I wonder what the change in colour is meant to signify...




It is all over, phew!


I hope that we all consider this a masterclass in how not to write an installer for a Macintosh application. I would love to know why the person / people who wrote this installer considered it suitable for release.

Are there any other Macintosh application installer nightmares that we should know about?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's clearly just a universal installer. Looks exactly the same as a Windows installer.

It would be nice if it was a proper Mac installer but I guess they just decided it didn't warrant the effort.

Desmond Elliott said...

Mike,

I have not installed it on Windows so I didn't know that was the case.

Regardless, Mac users expect either a drag and drop install or the use of the Installer application and not some hacked together monstrosity!

I think it should have warranted the effort because it is the first contact that you have with the finished product and it does not look as professional as the rest of the game.

Anonymous said...

Typical Mac boy... sheesh, it installed, the game works wtf are you whining about !

Get a furkin' life, then a PC and smile.