Devonthink Pro is not properly installed
Applications should not be started from their disk image but should be copied to your hard disk. Do you want to install DEVONthink Pro in the ‘Applications’ folder?
Clicking the “Cancel” button launches DTPro properly. However, this warning is bogus, since I am not launching DTPro from its disk image; indeed the disk image is not even mounted.
I get this warning if DTPro is located in either of:
~/Applications
/Users/Shared/Applications (where I normally install it).
This warning occurs each time I launch DTPro. It did not occur in b7 or previous versions. It does not occur (only ?) if I install it in /Applications.
It “feels like” someone is assuming that if DTPro is not in /Applications, then it must have been launched from the installation disk image. This is clearly not the case. I hope that this annoying warning will be eliminated or implemented properly in the final release.
• NEW: An alert on startup asks whether the application should be installed in the global Applications folder in case it’s not installed in one of the recommended locations for applications.
Yup, looks like an over-limiting assumption there.
A “don’t show this again” checkbox in the warning dialog could help, though it would still be best to reappear under certain too-risky conditions (e.g. really being run from a mounted disk image).
The bullet item above says “… should be installed in the global Applications folder …” (emphasis added), not “must …”, while the non-optional warning is trying to strictly enforce the latter rather than allow some acceptable flexibility (which possible side effects, e.g. services not working).
We are not simply checking for /Applications but also for ~/Applications, /Network/Applications etc. but it seems we have missed /Users/Shared/Applications.
Any location in your user’s directory or in /Users/Shared/ should be actually accepted, I’ve just checked this (~/, ~/Applications, /Users/Shared/, /Users/Shared/Applications) and no warning over here. Is it possible that there are multiple instances of DEVONthink installed on your computer?
This doesn’t seem to be fully supported by Cocoa, otherwise the warning wouldn’t appear. I’ll try to add a workaround but for now you have to use /Applications.
OK, but I really can’t help wondering why you’re bothering with this warning at all. In my limited use of b8 so far, DTPro seems to run just fine in this configuration, as do the 75 other apps which are located in the same directory, following the symlink, and have been for years. There’s probably a good reason why you’re doing this, but without an explanation it seems quite arbitrary.
In any event, if you can’t find a “proper” fix for this issue, might I suggest:
Some sort of checkbox/preference that lets me turn off this behavior,
or
Adjust DT to only emit this warning the first time the instance is run (sort of like the “you just downloaded this from the Internet - do you really want to launch it?” warning ),
or
Any other solution which will optionally “turn off” this behavior on a semi-permanent basis.
Before I run my daily backup of ~, I shut down DTPro and other database-y apps, so as to assure a consistent version of the database files. I won’t be a happy camper if I have to put up with this warning every day (at least once) when I re-launch DTPro…
It’s easy to speculate this was done as an attempt to help people who do mistakenly run DT from a mounted disk image, which seems like a good reason and not quite arbitrary to me.
That ought to satisfy anyone who wants to keep it from reappearing, even if launched from unsupported locations.
