Chapter 7. Standalone Applications
Even if
you manage to nail all aspects of
cross-platform programming and write a great application, you can
still create a horrendous user experience through poor application
packaging. The delivery of an
application, its installation, and even the way it is launched affect
what a user thinks about an application. You'll want
to spend as much time packaging up your application as you do
tweaking control and font sizes, editing line separators, and
monitoring threads in your code.
When actually packaging and delivering an application experience to
an end user, several different options are available to developers on
the Java platform. However, when boiled down to their basic states,
there are really just two categories of application delivery:
- Standalone applications
-
These applications
are installed and run completely on the end user's
physical machine. The user buys a CD, runs an installation program,
and buys new software to perform an upgrade. Typical examples are
word processors, spreadsheets, music players, and anything else you
might buy in a box at your local computer store.
- Web-delivered applications
-
Web-delivered applications may run
on a user's machine, but are installed from an
online web site. They are often more volatile in nature, releasing
upgrades (also installed from a web site) every few months, if not
every few weeks. All the updates installed via the Mac OS X System
Preferences control panel are web delivered.
This chapter looks at the first of these two categories and details
Mac OS X support for standalone applications. The next chapter
explores web-delivered applications. You'll
understand how both are options on a Mac OS X platform, as well as
how to package and deliver each.
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