Plaxo for Mac: Fail.

So I have been kinda-sorta messing around with the new Plaxo beta web thingee, despite a general dislike to social networking. (Every now and then I feel compelled to try out the current done thing, but just blobbing into Facebook seems pointless as everyone else is already there.)

Anyway, Plaxo ships some sort of Address Book.app plugin, which as near as I can tell syncs local addresses into the Plaxo cloud, and spams everyone to come and sign up. (Sidebar: Also, fail.)

I don’t know precisely because I didn’t install it. Why? Because it’s full of fail.

1. It is shipped as a zip that unzips to a disk image. Fail: please just either ship a disk image or a zip file, but not both. Seriously, guys, man hdiutil .

When you do this, it means you have a minimum of 2 double-clicks to even get to the install, and the user now has not one but 2 files to trash.

2. It ships as an Installer.app package. Fail: Why do you need to run as root to copy a file to /Applications? Hmm? An Installer.app package means, almost certainly, that it’s going to monkey with my startup items, Dock, or whatever. I didn’t ask for that, so fuck you, I’m not installing you.

Installer.app packages have a purpose. An app that reads a per-user, documented data store to talk via some REST-y cloud endpoint does not need anything more than drag-and-drop. If you must install long-lived things, 1)tell the user and 2)make it optional.