There is a public beta available of a new Shockwave installer
After the experience of installing Shockwave with my mother I concluded: "the lesson to learn is that - at least for my mother - the problem in installing the Shockwave plugin was in the combination of a long download and the number of dialogs". Anything that made her wait or choose made her doubt if she was doing a good thing.
The new Shockwave installer is about half the size of the previous versions, and has two less dialogs. Macromedia is listening!
I still think there remains a lot to be done:
- The installer still has a lot of files that Shockwave can easily do without, most remnants of a ShockMachine past. The installer could/should be less than 2 Mb without these files.
- Shockwave projectors don't seem to use the Xtra downloading mechanism that provides the Xtras that were not in the installer. As such, shockwave projectors are currently broken.
- The Yahoo toolbar thing is still a turnoff. To me, it is odd the Yahoo toolbar is (optionally) installed before Shockwave. You'ld say installing Shockwave has a higher priority than installing the Yahoo toolbar. People who cancel the install once they see the Yahoo offer will have canceled the whole Shockwave install :-(
Even so, I am please with the direction Shockwave is heading currently: forward!