InstallShield Sucks

Just when you thought the whole world was going to hell in a handbasket something comes along to take your mind off it. I know this blog is usually categorized as "Political" but let me make a brief digression to introduce to you, what must surely be the most infuriating piece of software I've used in the last four years: InstallShield. I think the name is ironic because for nearly all of the time I am using InstallShield, it seems intent of doing just that - shielding me from building a working installer. Its such an illogical piece of software and it has so many, many different paths to build something that just doesn't work.

And I'll tell you there's one thing worse than building a installer with InstallShield, only to find its broken. That's the twenty minutes or more you'll spend watching InstallShield churn out hundreds of megabytes of data, then all the time you spend installing it only to discover its broken, and then the equal amount of time watching it uninstalll the broken product, only to have to go and start all over again. It can be thirty minutes, or even an hour just to discover and correct the smallest problem, and as I mentioned, InstallShield seems to be deliberately designed to introduce myriads of ways to generate small problems. InstallShield is a major piece of software thats up to version 8 and is used by thousands of people day in and day out and still has really bad bugs that drive you nuts. No wonder the number of people taking anti-depressants is on the rise, its the thought of going to work and having to face software like InstallShield that's doing it.

There, I feel a little better now. But the problem is I still don't have a working installer since I now have a situation that every time I modify my installer to fix the latest "bug" InstallShield then decides it can no longer do a thing without telling me "InstallShield needs to close now". I think it should preface that message with "I can tell you're too angry to continue to use this software", that's about how I feel. Unfortunately if I quit my job to get away from using InstallShield I wont be able to claim unemployment. Crap, they think of everything. So I'm just going to uninstall it from my work machine, copy the entire 240Mb of pain to my home computer over the net and re-install it there in the hope, that it might, just might, decide to play ball and cough out a working installer before the software I'm trying to install becomes obsolete.

In the mean time, did I mention, InstallShield sucks ???