Build 10 -- Configs and more GUI

[Freddie]

when Mojo.setup installs on windows 7 Ultimate its installing itself as far as I can tell in a non standard area.

It's being installed by Microsoft. Microsoft chooses the location of the binary files. This is how ClickOnce works.

This has been discussed here several times already.

The location is a cache, like the cache your browser maintains for web pages. The real copy of Mojo is on the web. You probably don't care where your browser caches web pages, and for the same reason, you don't need to care where ClickOnce caches Mojo's binaries. All you need is the data files, and (as I'll tell you in a moment) they are in the standard place where people should expect to find them.

In C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\mojo you have
mojo.draw_positions.txt
mojo.log.txt
mojo.settings.txt
mojo_engine.log.txt
mojo.engine.settings.txt

That's Mojo's data folder. It's in one of the two standard places for application data as defined by Microsoft. It's Microsoft that sets the standards, not you or me.

Every Windows user account has two folders for user application data. The locations vary from one version of Windows to another, but you can find them quickly by opening a command window and typing these commands, which use environment variables which are defined by the OS:

(Edit: This isn't something a user will ever need to do. I'm telling you this because you're curious.)

dir %APPDATA%
dir %LOCALAPPDATA%

Now for the masses this is looks to be far more complicated and confusing
than just having the program install under

C:\Program Files\MOJO\

First of all, the masses won't be confused because 99% of them will never know or care. They have no reason to want to know about these folders. These are implementation details. These are technical things.

Second, the binaries cannot go there because ClickOnce won't put them there.

Third, data files should not go there because Microsoft tells programmers not to put data files there.

Microsoft tells programmers to put the user data where I put it (or alternatively in %APPDATA%).

My hope also is that with mojo.setup, we will be able to choose in the future where we wish it to install.

Why? Can you give me a reason?

Let's be clear on the tradeoff here.

In order to give users the option of controlling the location of Mojo's binaries -- an option that will be exercised by only a small fraction of them -- everybody has to give up ClickOnce.

ClickOnce has tremendous advantages. It's reliable; it's convenient; it's supported by a team at Microsoft; it guarantees that every user's Mojo is up to date; it's tested by Microsoft's quality assurance professionals on every version of Windows and hundreds of different computers; it's been tested by millions of users over a period of four (five?) years; and for what it does, it's extremely fast.

On the other side of the ledger, the advantages of installing binaries in c:\program files is ..... what exactly?

That the pathname would be shorter? Nobody will ever have to type it anyway.

P.S. Another thing. We're only talking about the installer. We're not talking about limitations on what you can do with Mojo. If you want to copy Mojo from the ClickOnce cache to c:/program files or anywhere else, go ahead. Nobody's stopping you. You can put it anywhere you want. The installer won't, but you can.