Re: Inno Next Step

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Inno comes with loads of "Technical" documentation and sod all help for
the
new starter. I have little doubt of it's abilities as an installer but
it's
one of those impenetrable tools for the first few installs you create.

I'm surprised to hear that. I've had the impression
from past posts that Inno was easy to learn and
very dependable. I've never heard a bad word about
it.

Sadly, I'm still wedded to Wise InstallBuilder for my commercial stuff
because I can see and predict what it's going to do in a nice, simple,
logical script. I have no idea what I'm going to replace it with.
Replacements are either massively expensive

Yes. It's incredible what they get away with. But I
suppose there's really only Microsoft to blame. When an
experienced programmer needs a special $1,000+ program
just to get their software onto Windows there's something
deeply wrong.

I use a customized version of PDW. I wrote a version that
doesn't need setup.exe and added updates like finding the
App Data folder:

www.jsware.net/jsware/vbcode.php5#set12

The basic PDW code works fine for basic installs, and it
allows customizing of the GUI, while Inno seems to only offer
that boring purple picture of a PC on the left side, and the
Wise/IS MSI-based tools, I assume, incorporate the problems
with MSIs, which includes the fact that altering the basic
setup and GUI involves a great deal of work. (I looked into
MSI installs when that was first becoming common and was
stunned by the gratuitous complexity and poor design of
it all. I can only guess that MS made a disaster of Windows
Installer under threat of a lawsuit from the likes of Wise and
IS.)

I've never had anyone complain about trouble with my
custom PDW installers, but I also don't ship anything with
ActiveX controls. It's mostly just an EXE, a few INI files, etc.,
that need to get copied over, and the basic Registry key
settings for uninstall. If you want to provide true "custom
install" options and other similar options you'd need to write
those from scratch. (The custom install option seems like a nice
idea, but in my experience it's either unutilized or irrelevant
in the vast majority of software installs, merely providing an
illusion of "greater consumer choice" to the person installing.)


.

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