For creating a setup file to install my application I am using a product called “Actual Installer”. I wondering if anybody else uses this product and has had luck with it.
I know a lot of people use the Setup builder from Lindersoft. Actual Installer costs $89.95 compared to Setup Builder at $299.00
Do they have actual support?
Yes they do have support.
I am looking for others who have used this product to see if they have any tips that might be helpful.
https://www.actualinstaller.com/ has a forum for users and a support email.
I do not want it to sound like I am promoting the product, I am just curious how many others are using it to launch their apps.
Two others to consider that are open source, widely used, and free are NSIS and Inno Setup. There’s probably a lot of talk on Stack Overflow.
sgower: I don’t see any mention that “Actual Installer” includes support for Code Signing. You could handle code-signing yourself, but having it built in as an installer feature is so much nicer. Also, I don’t really see mention of a scripting language. SetupBuilder gives you a graphical interface, but it can switch to scripting mode very easily and then back to graphical interface. It does a very good job at switching between the two interface modes.
You can code sign from the templates using #RunDll.
Now for some strange reason #Run doesnt work on my machine, it only works if the path can be found in the system environment path variable.
I usually did it with a BAT file that ran SignCode.exe, the more modern version is SignTool.exe. This makes it easy to log the output messages and see the problems. Even when I did it with SB I made a BAT as a backup to see any errors.
I do not know about the code signing in previous versions of SB. But under SB 10.x the display of code-signing error messages seems okay to me. I suppose the messages could scroll off of the screen though and you would have to scroll up to see them. I assume all types of code signing errors will display in SB’s output window, but maybe some errors types do not show? I’ve only seen CS errors like the following that occur when building the install exe without having the code-signing certificate available:
Adding Digital Certificate... Resolve CSI... SIGNTOOL: D:\Data\xxx\xx\Myxx.exe SVER: 10.0.16299.15 SHA2: 1 **Compiler error GEN1053: Code signing process failed. Error Code: 1** Terminating CSigning Process...[1]
When I read things like this and the effort that went into early copy protection
Cassette Copy Protection - Early Copy Protection on the Apple II (fadden.com)
which is on a par with doing something like this (only 20views 
)
Vertical Dominos make Mario’s Face - YouTube
I’m left with the impression todays code signing is not all that’s its cracked up to be.
For starters, where a prime number is used in encryption, whilst in theory primes are infinite, in practice, a pc only has a few milliseconds to come up with one. Let that sink in for a moment!
With that in mind, the range of primes available for encryption algo’s to use is heavily restricted by time, making cracking an algo something akin to fine tuned brute forcing imo.