Review Summary:
In case you’re a long-term Mac user, than you probably know all about DMG files and their possible uses. Before OSX App Store came into play, all OSX applications that you downloaded from the web came as DMG files, which are mountable images that open up and allow you to copy installation file(s) into your Applications folder. Even today there are many developers who are avoiding OSX App Store for some reasons, so if you download Skype or Dropbox (to give you a few nice examples) you’ll get to use their own nicely designed DMG files.
Even though average home users don’t have that much use from creating their own DMG files, most developers could greatly benefit from such an application. For many the first choice is OSX’s Disk Utility, which gives you a very tiresome process of creating a new DMG files and lacks some additional features that could be put to a good use. That’s why in this article you’ll get a chance to read about DropDMG, which is a third party DMG file creator.
To give you an example of a nicely designed DMG mountable file, let’s say that you downloaded Dropbox for OSX and that you’ve mounted that file. What you’ll see is a nice blue background, with some interesting graphics and there’s Dropbox app in the middle of that window. Well, DropDMG can help you create all of this, even if don’t have any knowledge of advanced scripting or anything like that. Now let’s see how this application works.
Once you open DropDMG for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a fairly known interface. In its very basic functionality, this application will allow you drag-and-drop a bunch of folders and files, and simply generate a disk image. If you’re willing to make a bit more advanced and nicely designed image, than you can use Layouts feature, to open up a WYSIWYG editor. You’ll be able to choose how large that DMG window is going to be, and then you can add a background, text, icons positions, and similar stuff. It even allows you to create a license agreement in multiple languages.
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After you’ve spent a lot of time making sure that your future DMG image will look and behave a certain way, you can save all these settings as a New Configuration. This way, once you decide to post an update to your app (for example), you can easily create a new DMG with all those settings already there.
I’ve explained possibly the best feature that you can find in DropDMG, but there are many more to explore. For example, you can burn DMG files to CDs and DVDs, encrypt your DMG files with 128-bit and 245-bit AES encryption, or create a device image clone.
DropDMG can be downloaded from its official website, and you can try it for 30 days. After that, you’ll need to purchase a license that’s priced at $24, which still seems like a very good deal.
DropDMG Editor's Review
DropDMG is an utility that provides you with lot of disk image management functionalities.The interface of this application is quite unusable. It has a small drop zone that can be used for the quick creation of the disk images, but the usable part ends here. If you want more functionality, then you need to search for it in the menus.
The disk image creation/conversion engine can do the same job as the freeware equivalent applications do. The 'Preferences' panel allows you to save the configurations, so you can use a specific configuration for any image that you create, depending on the case.
In the menus you can find functionality that's not typical for these kind of applications. You can fix a broken image, get the image info, mount the image with owners, mount the image at a given location, or you can verify the image checksum. DropDMG also provides burning functionality. You can either burn a folder/file or you can burn an existing disk image. DropDMG allows you to convert a graphic file into the .VolumeIcon.icns file.
Pluses: it provides a decent image manipulation functionality, it has burning support, it has advanced mounting features, there's a possibility to preview the file information for your existing images, it can fix the broken images, it can verify the checksum of the images.
Drawbacks / flaws: the interface of this application is a little unusable.
Masonic 3-5-7 Meaning
In conclusion: if you can get used to the minimal interface of this application, then the rest won't be a problem since the behavior during the tests was flawless. The advanced features and the burning support that can be used for regular burning tasks are also very helpful. If you would like to use other disk image applications, you can also check these: DMGConverter, DMG Designs, DMG Packager, CreaDMG, Chop DMG, FreeDMG, or an archiver with DMG creation capabilities, CleanArchiver.