View Single Post
10-01-09, 09:48 AM   #10
Zyonin
Coffee powered Kaldorei
 
Zyonin's Avatar
AddOn Author - Click to view addons
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 1,443
Originally Posted by nightcracker View Post
Hmm, nice guide, but IMO it's still too confusing for the end user. I'm experimenting with a simple form the end user has to fill in, and press download to generate a zip file with in it:

The raw data of your UI, with the WTF folders not renamed
An installer.exe
A .ini file which has the data from the form in it.

Now the installer.exe extracts the data from the .ini file and automaticly extracts, copies and renames all folders to the WoW folder. An EXAMPLE of this can by found at nclabs.heliohost.org. The content is still just me trying to get a description of an UI not finished lol. The form is there and works, the script for creating a zip file on the fly is there also, but not applied yet. Try it out and give your thoughts!
OK some kind of automatic BAT file is nice to help newbie install a UI, however the major download sites had problems with executable files installing keyloggers on user's PCs. The major download sites did allow UIs with self extracting installers in the past, however hackers managed to slip keyloggers in the few allowed self extracting UIs without the knowledge of the UI's author. Users who downloaded those UIs did not know those UIs had been tampered with nor was there any way for a casual user to know. Thankfully, our site admins found the "funny business" quite rapidly and shut it down. As a result, Curse/WoWInterface/WoWUI.Incgamers normally do not allow executable files to be uploaded to their sites except in certain rare cases and not for UIs.

Normally if the major UI sites allow a exe/bat type of upload, its for some kind of a utility and in every case (at least with WoWInterface), the site in question requires the source code to be available and the admins will usually take the executable apart to check for any nastyness. Even then most users on WoWI are very leery of any kind of WoW related executable file. They know the folks behind the keyloggers are extremely persistent and probably know someone who has been hacked or they have been hacked themselves.

In addition, .zip/.rar are multi-platform. Executables (except for things like Java based applications) are not. Remember that not everyone plays WoW using a Microsoft OS of some kind. Blizzard officially supports Mac OS X in addition to Windows 2000/XP/Vista. Plus WoW is Linux friendly via Wine. While exes can be run via Wine, it just easier for most people these days to do the unzip/move file/rename file route. Plus its more secure that way.
__________________
Twitter

Last edited by Zyonin : 10-01-09 at 09:56 AM.
  Reply With Quote