A quick tip for making installing applications easier

OK, you might be thinking: what’s NOT easy about installing an application on a Mac??? And you’re right: installing an application on a Mac is actually very easy. If the developer hasn’t packaged his software into an installation program, installing an app is as easy as dragging the icon from the app’s disk image to the Applications folder. Sometimes, the developer will have packed a shortcut to the Applications folder into the disk image, so you simply drag the application icon onto that shortcut right in the disk image and you’re done.

But many times the disk image consists only of the application icon, so you need to drag it to another Finder window onto the Applications folder. And that’s exactly where this little tip comes in handy. More than once I’ve had trouble finding a Finder window immediately where I could drag the app icon to. My monitor is usually a total mess of overlapping windows and finding a Finder window that’s on top of most other windows is often impossible.

So what did I do? I opened a new Finder window, switched back to the disk image, noticed that the Applications folder in the newly opened Finder window’s sidebar was being covered by the disk image’s window, dragged the disk image window to another location and then, finally, dragged the app icon from the disk image to the Applications folder. Not very Mac-like and certainly not very comfortable.

But there’s a better way. Watch the following short video to find out how to trim down this process by about 90%.

Tagged as: app_installation, finder

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