iWork Installation Nightmares

17 September 2005

We went to the new Apple Store at Bluewater today for the first time. Having been to the Regent Street House of Pod a fair few times, I wasn’t sure what to expect of the much smaller Bluewater store. I was pleasantly surprised though – it’s fantastic. The lack of crowds and the abundance of extremely helpful and energetic staff left such a good impression that I’d happily visit the smaller store in preference to St Steve’s Cathedral any day.

We picked up some bits and bobs, including a new Mac mini and a copy of iWork 05. Once we’d got home I set up the new mini and ran through the initial configuration, including a Software Update to get it up to standard. I then popped in the iWork DVD and ran the installer. Agreed to all the EULAs etc, clicked Just Sodding Do It, and was presented with this:

There is nothing to install.

So I quit out, repaired permissions for luck, rebooted and tried again. Same message. Hmm. Googling the error pointed out that there could be an existing install of iWork on the disc, preventing the installer from doing its business. Poking around in /Applications revealed that there was indeed a demo version of both iWork apps present.

Now, had I been of calm mind at this point, I probably should have just run the demo and found a place to enter my license key to unlock it. But instead, I chucked the whole folder in the bin. Take that!

Running the installer again provided an entirely different result. It went through all the motions and finally reported that iWork had installed. The result of this, however, was simply an empty /Applications/iWork folder with no applications inside. No Pages, no Keynote. Lather, rinse, repeat, empty folder.

To cut a long story short, what had happened was that Software Update had spotted the trial versions of Pages and Keynote and installed some dot-release updates to them. Subsequent running of the installer from the DVD found the receipts for the updates and concluded that I had a newer version installed that was on the DVD, so did nothing. Nightmare.

The solution was to spotlight (is that a verb yet?) for all instances of iWork, Pages and Keynote and trash the files, paying special attention to the items in the /Library/Receipts folder. Empty the trash and run the installer again, and you’re done.

Of course, you then have to download those updates again …

As a reasonably experienced technical user the whole process took about an hour to sort out, and I was really getting frustrated with the whole process. I dread to think how a user new to the Mac would have got on. I expect they would have been on the phone to tech support and pretty damn frustrated. Hell, I was frustrated. Apple really need to test iWork more thoroughly.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Hans: I had the same experience upon botting up my first Powerbook for the first time. Somehow it came to me that iWork and Pages were already installed, and I proceeded to launch both and then found out how to enter the serial. If iWork and Pages are already installed on new machines, wouldn’t Apple save a whole lot of money by just selling registration keys, online even?
§ Sunny: Better yet iWork should be included with new Powerbooks just like iLife. Even iBooks get AppleWorks. I didn’t even get that!

Pages has been indispensable. Just do your magic and export it DOC or PDF. Of course Word cannot always handle the conversion but it can only improve in the future versions. Pages is one Apple app that looks very promising.
§ Small Paul: Oof. That’s some dumb stuff. The software should be clever enough to know what’s a trial and what’s a proper version, and generally have a clue what’s going on.

I guess this is what happens when managers and marketers decide a trial version would be a good thing, without telling the software engineers about it.

This is a very Microsoftian thing. Not what we want on our Macs. Bleurgh.
§ Lelly McDrew: You really need to be smart enough to remove demo copies of any app, as well as its prefs and any support files, before installing any full version.

If you had have thought for a moment before clicking the installer excitedly, you might have figured this out on your own.

You didn’t, and had to blog about it, wasting more time that could have been better spent getting more familiar with the apps themselves.

Better luck next time.
§ Drew: ‘Lelly’ – you missed the point entirely. If it’s this hard to sort out when you know your way around the system, how much trouble is it going to cause new users and switchers?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it really shouldn’t be needed for installing Apple software on a brand new Apple computer.
§ Jason: just have to say thank you. I to was running in to the same problem, only I started “googling” around for help and this is the first blog I came across. Thanking you from California… J
§ Timothy Carl Buchheim: No need to delete anything or install anything. Just run the “demo” version already on your hard disk and enter a serial number. I’m pretty sure that’s all you have to do.
§ Jeff Hartman: Lelly – worthless post by you I’d say.

I’m glad you posted this (even though I probably won’t ever by iWork) because Google sucks it up and provides the solution for others. Gruber posted about this awhile back:

http://daringfireball.net/2004/05/writing_for_google
§ Peter Mount: I agree with Drew when he says “how much trouble is it going to cause new users and switchers?” I’m looking to upgrade my hardware in the (hopefully) not too distant future. I’ve always been with Intel and Windows but I would like to keep my options open. If I were to switch to the Mac I’d only do it if I could be certain it was a painless switch.
§ Bjoern: Using the demo and the s/n. Thats it. A hint would be worth the price of the package ;-)

Greetings from Old Europe
§ Philip Bragg: If the initial message had been a bit more verbose I doubt Drew would’ve looked online to decipher it. Small details like that can make or break software and considering that Apple is the vendor of everything involved in this situation, this is a screw-up. Just how much communication is required to let the developers of iWork know that a demo version that only requires unlocking may well be preinstalled and get them to alter a generic installer message accordingly?
§ Lee Hession: Just got a new iMac after my iBook had been stolen and tried to install iWork’s but came up against the same problem…...aarrgh!

I don’t know whether anyone else has had this but I couldn’t see any icons for Keynote or Pages in the Applications/ folder?!

Thanks for the information, it worked a treat!
§ nobody: Ditto, ditto, ditto. Thanks for posting this. You saved me significant travails.
§ Peter: Thanks from me too. I could not believe an install could be so broken and/or lazy as to simply refuse to do anything. Well done!
§ Kim jimenez: I had the same problem and did exactly the same thing you did but i still get an empty folder! any ideas?
§ ChillyWilly: Thanks for the tip from this seasoned Mac user. Ran into this on a Mac mini. Once the receipts were deleted, along with the other Prefs and iWork related files, a re-install worked just fine.

All in the <head>