The Least Likely Ways to Install Rogue Amoeba’s Apps

Here at Rogue Amoeba, we recently completed an overhaul of the first-run experience of our audio capture apps. Until just a few months ago, the process for installing Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, Piezo, and SoundSource was much more complex than we wanted, due to changes made by Apple in 2020. In fact, our walkthrough document for the process contained 20 discrete steps, which was certainly not ideal.

Luckily, we’ve replaced that difficult first-run experience with a far friendlier setup window, one which needs no separate documentation at all. It’s a huge improvement, keeping our users informed while also maintaining the approachability we want our apps to have.

The new setup window, as seen in SoundSource

This change provides a dramatically improved experience, and we wanted to bring it to the attention of folks who had been scared off by the previous process. But how exciting, really, can you make a permissions window?

I have a little design game I sometimes play when I’m stuck on something. Instead of thinking “What is the best way to do something?” (which is sometimes not that clear) I instead think “What would be the worst way to do this?”. Exploring the negative often helps expose a useful contrast, and it can sometimes lead me to the best way to do something. I decided to apply that little mental exercise to how we’d show off our new and much improved setup experience. As a child of the 80’s, I immediately thought that the worst way to install our software would be via floppy disk —the install medium that existed when I first started using computers. The floppies would of course come in a box, and be purchased in person a retail computer store.

As you can see above, I started by mocking up just the boxes. Soon, though, I got carried away reimagining as many different antiquated installation mediums as I could. This brought some genuine heartfelt nostalgia.

In roughly reverse chronological order, we start with SoundSource on CD-ROM:

Loopback on 3.5” floppy (requiring 25 disks):

Audio Hijack on 5.25” floppy (requiring 181 disks):

Airfoil on cassette:

And most silly of all was Piezo on about 150,000 punch cards:

I really enjoyed rendering each of these retro mediums in detail. Each was painstakingly hand-rendered as a 2D vector-based image. The stickers, boxes, and labels were first rendered out into flattened image files, and then passed through a halftone pattern filter to create a genuine printed look, before being brought back into my vector drawing app. It can be hard to see this detail from images used on social media, so here’s a zoomed-in view of the SoundSource CD:

As lovably retro as these installation mediums would be, they certainly wouldn’t be convenient. I’m grateful that the new much-simplified setup window is paired with incredibly simple download buttons on our site.