Broderbund WTF
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So I'm working on repackaging the Broderbund Printshop installer into an MSI. I'm not a programmer by trade (I picked up a few things here and there but nothing in-depth), but I can't find any good reason for this behavior:
The program requires Macromedia Shockwave Player 8 and Acrobat Reader 5.1. Now, up until now it's been my understanding that when a package says that it requires version x.y.z of a program, that means it requires *at least* that version, right? Not Printshop. No, it requires *precisely* version 8 of Shockwave and *precisely* version 5.1 of Acrobat. The first time through the installer (on a machine with Shockwave 10 and Acrobat 8.1) it tried installing the old versions of those programs. I'm thinking that maybe it's just hardcoded to look in certain paths (because Adobe, for better or worse, hardcodes all their major release version numbers into their paths). So I hunt around, download Reader 5.1 and Shockwave 8, install them on the clean system, then start up the installer again to capture all the files. And still it wants to install its version! The only thing I can think is that the geniuses at Broderbund decided to run their 3rd-party redistributables, regardless of whatever version happens to be installed at the time.
Maybe a programmer can tell me better - certainly this isn't a good idea? And what's the deal with Broderbund in general? Every product of theirs I've tried has been junk. They seem not to understand the concept of minor revisions, because every time their software is released it's up a new version - I think they're at version 22 of Printshop. So what in the world is up with them?
</rant>
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Brøderbünd was great once upon a time.... about twenty years ago, in the days of the Apple ][ and the Commodore 64. Nowadays, they're rarely heard from, but the fact that they are still touting a title that was once handy as all get-out, but is now of questionable usefulness tells me that they can't be doing very well.
Really, what can Print Shop do that MS Word can't?
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I seem to recall that broderbund had at least one piece of non-wtf software...
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I remember an ancient version (probably 1996) of Encyclopedia Britannica that required Netscape 2.0. And it worked flawlessly in IE or any other browser, being simply a bunch of linked HTML pages.
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not sure precisely what's happening with this software but if you try to repackage 3 apps into 1 you'll be looking at a world of hurt. Divide and conquer.....
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@RaspenJho said:
I seem to recall that broderbund had at least one piece of non-wtf software...
They were the publishers of the original Prince of Persia (the DOS one is still one of my favourite games) as well :D
And Stunts (which was my favourite game for a while, just because of all the stupid glitches and stupid stunts you could do)
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@Daniel15 said:
@RaspenJho said:
I seem to recall that broderbund had at least one piece of non-wtf software...
They were the publishers of the original Prince of Persia (the DOS one is still one of my favourite games) as well :D
And Stunts (which was my favourite game for a while, just because of all the stupid glitches and stupid stunts you could do)Oh, right! That's where I've heard them from... Brilliant game (PoP) that one.
