Thursday, April 12, 2007

Congratulations (2007)

I will not be working with the Mozilla Foundation this summer but I will be working with OpenMRS.

I would like to wish Jeff Dlouhy a lot of success this summer working on Tabsposé.

I really new to get a new name and address for my blog.

Dear Applicant,

Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. Please
check your student home page in the SoC web application at
http://code.google.com/soc/student_home.html to determine which of
your applications was accepted.

Over the next few days, you will be added to a special members only
Google Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-students-list).
Please take a moment to browse the archive before posting. We prefer
most of the program discussion to take place on the program discussion
list. However, the students list is a private place for communication
about subjects where our student participants prefer to not
communicate the matter more widely. You can find more information
about the program mailing lists here:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/guide-to-program-mailing-lists

Your mentoring organization may also set up similar mailing lists for
you and your cohorts so that they may interact with you on your
project. You should not wait for them; please feel free to contact
your mentor and let them know you are ready to start engaging with
your new project community.

You should also get into the habit of visiting your student home page
on a semi-regular basis, as we will track status, payments, paperwork
and take final surveys from this page.

If you have questions regarding payment, please wait until you see a
message from Leslie Hawthorn detailing what we will need from
you. This will take a few days as we button up the web application and
make sure all the students are properly assigned to the proper groups.

If you cannot take part for some reason, please email us at
gsoc@google.com as soon as possible so that we can allocate your slot
to another student.

Other questions and concerns should be send to gsoc@google.com

Thanks for taking part; we're very excited to see what the Summer will bring!

Congratulations once again,

The Google Summer of Code Progam Administration Team

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?