Faced with widespread criticism of its installation program, IBM Corp is going back to the drawing board for the PowerPC version of OS/2. The Personal Software Products Division intends to ship an object-oriented installer that will provide for drag and drop handling of system components. The installer code will also be given to application developers, saving them the trouble of writing their own installer and giving end-users a consistent interface when loading new software onto their machines. In traditional object fashion, developers will be able to customise the installer by overriding its default behaviour if required. Arnold Bramnick, part of IBM’s OS/2 technical strategy team, says that by using the IBM code, developers could reduce the 20,000 lines of code in a typical application installer to about 2,000. The division is obviously taking care to get it right this time; the object installer was reportedly close to completion when both the user interface design and application programming interface set was put up for review.
