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Yes, the new version of Flip4Mac is out, and along with new features, is an old bit of dumb.

Flip4Mac decided that once you install it, you simply MUST SEE THE FLIP4MAC FOLDER AND ALL THE COOLNESS WITHIN!!!!1111

Yes, Flip4Mac is a QuickTime player codec. It doesn't really have a lot to show you. Oooh...a plugin. Damn, that's a right purty plugin there boys. But wait, it gets better.

What happens when you say, dump this installer .mpkg on a bunch of machines at the login window via Apple Remote Desktop or some other tool?

Why, Flip4Mac helpfully creates, UNDER THE LOGIN WINDOW a full GUI root login. Finder and everything. Now, there are some applications that run in GUI mode behind the login window, Retrospect being the most well - known. That's kinda dumb too, but not AS dumb, because it is ONLY Retrospect running, and you have to authenticate to interact with Retrospect in that situation. Oh, and THE FINDER isn't running either. You quit Retrospect, you're at a standard login. Besides, at least Retrospect is, oh, DOING SOMETHING of more value than just saying "DADDYDADDYMOMMYMOMMYLOOKATME!!!111"

Yes, I emailed Flip4Mac. Their response was "Oh, we'll look into that". Yes, I've been in this business long enough to know what the polite form of an upraised middle finger is. I even emailed Apple, because it occurred to me that being able to run the Finder and have full local access WITHOUT A VALID LOGIN is...what's the phrase...oh yes: A VERY VERY BAD IDEA.

My back and forth with Apple was basically:

Apple: They shouldn't do that.
Me: I agree, however, the fact that it's so easy to do this is a bad thing, and should be fixed.
Apple: They shouldn't do that.
Me: We established that it's a dumb idea, however, letting two lines of shell: flip4MacFolder="/Applications/Flip4Mac" and open "$flip4MacFolder" create a root-level GUI login for any reason is really a bad idea.
Apple: They shouldn't do that.

After a while, even I get the hint. (Yes, I know, I probably pissed someone off. Well, when I get blown off after raising a serious issue, I don't really care if the people who blew me off don't like me. Blowing someone off like that is unprofessional. This all happened quite a long time ago, and since no one from either side is going to fix it, then I don't see a problem with pointing that out to the world at large. If it's not a real problem, then who cares who knows, right?)

The one bright side in the Flip4Mac stupidity is that it's real easy to fix. In the .mpkg, just comment out the open "$flip4MacFolder" line in the postflight script. (According to BBEdit, it's line 32, the last line before the script exit statement, which is so helpfully hardcoded to exit 0, so even with this hack, the script always exits cleanly.)

I'm sure the Flip4Mac marketing people think that opening a folder in the install is just the b0mbzz0r, but folks? When you have to remote install this on a few hundred or few thousand machines, and you discover that you have to forcibly reboot ALL of them to fix this little fuckup? It makes us want to find you at the WWDC and say unkind things to you. Loudly. Very unkind things. Maybe you should perhaps fix your installer, and avoid making us say unkind things?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Flip4Mac, Really bad strategy, TEH STOOPUD

Comments

Why am I reading this post? Because I went hunting for Flip4Mac idiocy after having discovered a folder in the root of my boot volume whose name is a string of hex and whose contents are two other folders with similarly enigmatic names.

Guess what? It's been a quiet week and the only thing in my system with the same create date is Flip4Mac.

Not happy. I still have no idea what those folders are doing there and I'm too spooked to risk taunting Happy Flip4Mac lest It decide I've broken It and hurt my system.

Posted by: Peter | November 16, 2007 6:48 AM