Zimbra Desktop for the Mac

[otisthegbs]

We're currently evaluating Zimbra for a Professional Network Edition deployment and while we're being constantly impressed with the suite as a whole we've found some extremely annoying factors in Zimbra Desktop.

First, the dock icon, it's not pretty. There's artifacted anti-aliasing around the edges, no gradients, and boring.

Second, the installer. The Zimbra Desktop installer wants to install Zimbra to three places, a; ~/zimbra(main application) b; ~/Desktop/Zimbra Desktop.app and c; /Applications/Zimbra Desktop.app. Try installing Zimbra Desktop while using PHD. It constantly alerts you with permission errors about not being able to put .app in /Applications. Also, since Zimbra Desktop is designed to be installed on a per user basis (as opposed to per machine) non-priviledged users must run the installer, which results in the aforementioned problem.

Third, Zimbra Desktop paths. Why oh why is the application located in the root of the users home directory???!?!?!?! This makes life so hard for us Mac administrators!!! Here is the output of Zimbra Desktop.app->MacOS->zdesktop (note this example is in the root account)

exec /var/root/zimbra/zdesktop/./macos/prism/Prism.app/Contents/MacOS/prism -webapp /var/root/zimbra/zdesktop/./zdesktop.webapp -profile /var/root/zimbra/zdesktop/./profile

That's it?

Why can't the application be in /Applications and the user's store be located in the home directory. Or better yet, in ~/Library where it belongs. Now, I know that there is a plist that needs to be installed in each user's LaunchAgents folder so perhaps a small shell script could initiate a new user on a computer that already has the main Zimbra Desktop installed.

Having the whole zimbra desktop in the home folder makes phd run a LOT slower. It adds almost 5 mins just for checking the filesystem contents, and for those of us who like to have a simple clean home directory it makes getting out of the office harder when it comes time to sync.

This is just my two cents. And for the record, as I've already said, we are BLOWN AWAY with how amazing the Zimbra experience has been. Keep up the great work. I'm going to try and pull the Zimbra Desktop application apart so that it's more "Mac" like

[jjzhuang]

All valid points. We are quite aware of many of these issues. The reason that the current version of zdesktop install to where it is now is primarily because we chose to have similar install layout across all 3 platforms we support. Different platforms have different conventions in terms of where everything should go. So for version 1.0 we elected to be simple first.

Now I totally understand this is very un-Mac-native like. The way we do things now also limit zdesktop to single user per box. All these will change once we go beyond 1.0 (see Bug 15608 - Install the application and data in their proper folders).

Now regarding permission issues with installing to /Application folder, that's a limitation of install4j, the packaging software we use. Again, we chose install4j because provides uniform behavior across all 3 platforms, but that does mean it lacks certain features such as acquiring additional privilege during installation. We will reconsider packaging software choice after 1.0 as well.

Short term, what we will do is to avoid installing to /Application folder altogether. That will at least avoid permission issue.

Finally regarding not having everything under home dir. For that you do have a choice. As long as you have a folder where the user has read/write permission, you can install there instead of under home dir. Maybe you didn't see that screen?

Thanks for your feedback!

[mmorse]

Originally Posted by otisthegbs

First, the dock icon, it's not pretty. There's artifacted anti-aliasing around the edges, no gradients, and boring.

Zimbra Desktop Replacement Icon

Not sure if anyone filed in bugzilla after that discussion / if we've changed it since in our nightly builds (I'm not a mac user). You could dig through perforce if you'd like to see if we did for a later release, or just wait till a mac user chimes in

As that other discussion (and license faq) points out: Branding is important to us, but seeing as you can technically change to whatever dock icon you want on a whim we'd really rather have you at least use one of our own - not beveled/shaded/gradients like you're asking but there is an:

(In our perforce)
If you need to replace the: