The good folks at the Omni Group must be happy. Apple has just promoted their browser to be part of the iLife suite of applications. Well, almost.
Like any good Mac user I today proceeded to download the iLife updates from Software Update. While I am aware of the fact all applications should be closed when applying upgrades, I confess I was at the time tinkering within OmniWeb and didn’t think much of it - especially since all my iLife applications were safely out of the way.
Suddenly, Software Update was seized by a newfound fury: application icons were bouncing and my computer beeping like if it had a life of its own. Indeed, it was desperately trying to get me to see a dialog instructing me to “Quit iWeb before applying this update”.
From the “iWeb” reference, I gathered “this update” referred to the iWeb installer. All is well, of course, except I was most certainly not using iWeb at the time - and I am most certainly not using iWeb at all, anyway. So, why the insistence? With no way to pause the dialog, I was forced to look into a solution.
Of course, the iWeb installer package runs a preflight script that checks whether this application is launched or not and instructs the user to quit it if so. Only this script seems to detect any application containing the word “Web” in its name as iWeb, including good old OmniWeb.
Quitting OmniWeb and validating the dialog indeed caused the script to proceed normally.
I know very little about bash scripting and regular expressions. In fact, I’m better at cooking croque monsieurs and coq au vin than at getting my terminal echo “Hello world” with a script. Yet, it seems to me something like that in an Apple installer is rather unsettling.
Seems to me the script is probably looking for iWeb - (Omn)iWeb.
Or it could be finding anything with the name "iWeb" in it (rather than "Web" as "Omn-iWeb"
It shouldn't have happened. It isn't difficult to apply a regex that would find "iWeb" and ignore "OmniWeb". On the other hand, I'm in favor of shutting everything possible down when installing new software or applying updates.
Sounds like another piece of quality scripting from the genius that brought us the "iTunes 2 erases your hard drive" bug:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/11/04/icatastrophe
At least this one wasn't destructive...
This happened too with the Backup update and my Tri-Backup background process was causing it to scream at me that a copy of Backup was still running. Very annoying and very amateurish scripting on Apple's side. Especially since you wouldn't know what's going on if you're not familiar with Terminal. tsk, tsk, tsk
furry or fury?
LOL! Thanks for catching it... As much as I would like to see a furry Software Update, fury seems more appropriate here. Typo corrected.
Hey, what if it was looking for things that used webkit, since omni uses that too
OmniWeb doesn't use WebKit (yet) it uses its own modified version of WebCore.
It got me too. I was just reading this when it asked me to quite OmniTunes.
The same thing happened when I first installed iWeb. Well, essentially.
In its zeal to place these new icons in my dock, it placed the iWeb icon right where the OmniWeb icon lives and got rid of OmniWeb from the dock. (Pretty noticable since OmniWeb sits in the honored first position in the dock and of the iLife apps, I only use iTunes often enough to warrant a place in the dock. The others stacked up at the end with iWeb sitting all by itself off where OmniWeb usually is.)
Actually, it probably detects anything with the word "iWeb" in it as OmniWeb would fit into that category.
Same used to happen with iTunes; "iTunes Helper" or whatever it was called would match and stop the thing from working. The idea (Apple, are you listening?) is either to search for ^iTunes$, or to search for a process called "iTunes" with a Carbon PSN, or to 'tell application iTunes to quit'. Carbon PSNs are a ridiculous piece of history and ought to die. NOW.
ah! i was wondering what was going on. OmniWeb was indeed running when Software Update asked me to quit iWeb, and iWeb was not. i decided to quit all my open apps.. and the installer continued. i didn't even make the OmniWeb/iWeb connection, but it makes sense.
Yeah, I noticed that too. As a happy and proud OmniWeb user I was bummed that Software Update would behave so poorly. I had to switch to the user that was running OmniWeb in order to continue the install.