Edit: Josh Karlin commented to this blog post that the LUA bug has been fixed. Thanks Josh!
Read the rest of Launchy has a LUA bug.
Josh, what you're doing I would almost call pulling an Irfan (see IrfanView forgets settings: fix). Being a programmer myself, I have learned ages ago that working with zero and one doesn't mean that there are only two mutual exclusive options.
How about making it an installation option? How many people of the 55,000 you mention run Launchy of a memory stick? The majority?
Moreover, does it really matter if you can simply fix this LUA bug by just asking during installation what one wants. Maybe you can add a special memory stick option? I mean, Firefox is able to run from a memory stick, yet it doesn't have the LUA issue Launchy has at this very moment.
As of the uninstalling issue, you can add to the readme: if you install it the normal way, you are stuck with the same issue a lot of programs have: cruft in your application directory. (And how much cruft are we talking about, 10 kilobyte?)
Or you can remove the cruft during uninstall. To me it sounds not harder then getting a list of all Windows XP users, and checking the application directory of each for a Launchy folder. I am sure Windows XP can provide you with such a list. You already keep track of who did run Launchy or not: if someone did, there is a Launchy folder with a launchy.ini and launchy.db.
On a side note, personally I would prefer that a standard uninstall option with every application would become: "Do you want to remove the files from the application directory of each user?"
Final quesions: why would someone want to uninstall Launchy? After the LUA fix it does exactly what I was expecting from it after reading the website, and it works great. How many of the 55,000 people have uninstalled Launchy by now?
Final remark: the reason only 2 people have mentioned the LUA problem (I didn't know there was another one) might very well be that other people have bumped into replies like yours in the past, and gave up. Moreover, I couldn't be bothered by registering with SourceForge, and I am probably not the only one, especially since it seems that one has to register almost daily with a site to interact nowadays.
Irfan said I was the only one complaining about it, yet the comments to the article (Comments: IrfanView forgets settings: fix) give me the impression that I am certainly not the only one having problems with LUA bugs. So don't use the number of complaints to justify a decision.
Finally (and worse) maybe a lot of those 55,000 people run everything as Administrator partly thanks to LUA bugs like Launchy and IrfanView has.
Edit: the per user Application Directory might also be a good location for users to have their own Utilities directory. Also, I would love to be able to manually type the directory location (I somehow wasn't able to manually do this by editing the ini file).
On July 14th you wrote: 'Yesterday I looked for a way to contact the author, but couldn't find his email address. I couldn't be bothered to sign up with SourceForge so I decided to write about it in my blog.' and on the 16th the author Josh had already found your note.
Sure beats drums!
By the way, I caved ;) The LUA bug is already squished in svn and will be taken care of appropriately in the next version.
Thanks for your comments and concerns.
Josh
Thanks Josh!
Will update the page as well to reflect this. Have been extremely busy the past 2 weeks after I returned from a short holiday, hence the huge delay.
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The earlier versions of Launchy did in fact install in your app data directory. The problems with this approach are:
1) uninstalling is difficult because you don't know which users have run it. I believe most programs don't bother uninstalling the files. I don't believe in leaving cruft behind. Of course, it's possible to keep track of, but a royal pain.
2) *many* people requested that I move it so that Launchy could be run from a memory stick. In other words, plug it into any computer and have it work with no hassle.
So, weighing the many people that have requested the move, to the now 2 people (of over 55,000) that have mentioned the LUA problem, LUA loses.
Josh