Betalogue

Take this error message produced by Mac OS X’s Installer while installing a GarageBand Jam Pack:

It doesn’t tell you what the errors are. It asks you to try again, and the only button available is “Close.” Why can’t it provide a “Try Again” button, if that’s what you’re supposed to do?

And then, what if you try again and you get the exact same error message? and again? and again?

That’s exactly what happened to me the other day. I eventually figured out what the problem was myself, which had to do with the method I use to install GarageBand’s support files on a separate volume.

But I have also seen this message appear on occasion with various installers simply because I was installing a number of things at the same time. (Mac OS X’s installer lets you run several installer scripts at the same time.) In that case, the solution was to restart the machine altogether and run the same installer again.

But that’s not what “try again” means either. “Try again” is a pretty useless recommendation when trying again doesn’t work. It doesn’t give you any indication of what you might want to try to do differently.

I understand the need to keep the really geeky stuff hidden from view. Messages like “Error -5498” are not exactly helpful either. But this particular behaviour is taking things to the opposite extreme. It amounts to saying, “There were errors installing the software, but we are not going to tell you what they were, and you might want to try installing the software again, just in case the errors don’t occur again. If they do occur again, then you are on your own.”

Not my idea of a user friendly interface.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.