All in the <head> – Ponderings and code by Drew McLellan –

iWork Installation Nightmares

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.