Java multiplatform installers are sooooo 90s.

Increasingly, a great number of our InstallBuilder customers have been InstallShield refugees. Desktop application development has never been Java's forte, but one of my early experiences with multiplatform installation tools was the now defunct InstallShield Multiplatform. The tool had a lot of shortcomings, but what really irritated me was the really ugly Java AWT interface that made us Linux users feel like we were second-class citizens.

Because of those early experiences, at BitRock we always strive to offer you a truly native installation experience. For example, on Unix we provide both Gtk and Qt-based frontends to our installation tool. In addition to being pretty, by virtue of not requiring the bundling of a JRE, our installers are also lean and mean, as we will comment on future posts.

The Road to 4.2.0

We are currently hard at work on the 4.2.0 version of InstallBuilder.

It includes support for FreeBSD 6.0 and Linux on IA64 (Itanium). Although regular FreeBSD 5 and x86 Linux binaries can run ok with compatibility libraries installed, we had customer requests for pure, native ports.

Expanding on the multiple parameters per page feature introduced in InstallBuilder 4.0, you can now arrange parameters on screen. To do so, you can now set the orientation property of a parameterGroup parameter to horizontal or vertical. See the pictures some examples running on Windows and Linux (Qt mode) and the corresponding XML code. Click on the images to see them full-size.

Hola Mundo!

About 4 years later than originally planned, the BitRock blog is finally live, which we will use to keep you up to date on our our plans for world domination. We promise not to publish any cat pictures, as that niche is already well covered