Pop The Pill: Quick Tip for Making Custom Installs on OS X a Tad Easier

For the longest time, I installed my Mac applications into a ~/Applications (off the home directory instead of the root directory). The primary reason for this at the time was to make backup and restore simpler. By keeping the installed apps separate from the stock Mac OS X applications, it made i easier to fire up a new machine image and then just copy back the home directory. Now that I am using Time Machine with a Time Capsule, this is probably irrelevant. Nevertheless, as a creature of habit, even today I was installing Firefox 3.0, I put it under my home directory.

The nifty tip that I’d like to share is that when you see this:

and you would like to drag the application to your custom location instead of the Alias which some applications are now providing on the disk image. How can you actually access your folders?

Well, you click the pill! Yes, that tiny pill in the upper right-hand corner of every Finder window that you probably just block out as useless is actually perfect for this situation.

And now, we drag. THAT IS ALL.