Is "no installation" software a good thing?
- by Yaron Naveh
I am building an application that will, hopefully, be used by developers.
To be appealing to developers I want it to be lightweight, small in size, and with no installation (e.g. xcopy). I trust more an application without installation to not put garbage in my registry, to be lightweight etc.
My friend thinks the opposite: An installer puts shortcuts on the desktop / menu for me, it ensures cleanup via the uninstaller, and seems more official.
I'm curious - what is everyone's take on this?