DMG Architect: Make Stunning Disk Images With Ease

If you’ve ever developed an app, you know how important first impressions are. If you’ve ever downloaded an app, you probably know it too. For downloadable apps, the DMG is the virtual box. You wouldn’t want to buy a piece of boxed software with nothing on the box, so why would you want to download an application with a blank DMG? This is where most users’ first impressions will com from! Well, if you do want good first impressions for your app, than I have a great app for you. It’s called DMG Architect, by Sourcebits.

DMG Architect is like Interface Builder for your disk images, helping you make a great design for them. Whenever you open it, the theme viewer will open. This is where you will choose the basic background image for your DMG. You can choose one of the included ones, choose an image from your disk or get the background from a disk image that you have on your computer. I think that the included themes are great; I have never found myself in need of any others. If you need the disk image window to be big, though, you may have problems with their themes, because for the most part the images are pretty small.

Once you have chosen a theme, you are almost done! First, you probably want to drop the files that you need onto DMG Architect’s window. Then you will want to open the Inspector. This is where you will customize almost every aspect of your DMG. First there is Position & Size. This is where you can choose the size of the window for your DMG and where it is located on the user’s screen. In the next tab (Icon Properties) you can actually choose an icon to use for the DMG and/or the file. This is another easy way to give a great impression to users. Now, in the DMG Background Background tab, you can choose a background to use from your disk. There is also a toolbar item in DMG Architect labeled “Template” which will just bring up the theme viewer.

In the next tab, License, you can add license agreements to your DMG. These are those pesky popups you get when you open disk images. I have to be honest, these can turn me away from an app, but if you need a user to agree to something, you will need one of these. The DMG Properties is where you specify the properties for your final DMG. These are basically the options you get in Disk Utility for creating a new disk image. And the final tab, DMG Info, is just the place to specify names for the Volume and file and the save location.

As you might be able to see, DMG Architect, by Sourcebits, is a very simple app. It makes things that usually take 30 minutes or more in the Finder, take under 5 minutes instead. If you’re a developer, you know that time is money, and this app definitely values that. Although the price tag, $29.99, may seem a little pricey, it is an invaluable little tool, and will end up being worth it. Like I said above, because time is money, this app will end up saving you money, so in the end, it will pay for itself.

share permalink ping Leave a Comment