Avatech - Computers, Technology, Games, Movies, Airsoft Guns and More!: Smart Install Maker

Have you ever been thinking about creating an installer just like the famous InstallShield, but don't want to get confused with all the scripting codes and steep learning curve?
Do you want to pack your program or files in easy way but still have a professional look?

If you say yes to one of questions above, then you may need an installer creator program. An installer creator will create an installation package just like what you see when you are installing a new program.

Description: Sample of an installer setup

However, the problem is that usually installer creator program like InstallShield is very complex, includes scripting, and require much hard drive space. For an ordinary programmer, you won't need a lot of extra features that InstallShield offers. You may only need some of several installer features such as:

Produces small installation size (Good compression algorithm)
Easy to use (No need to learn)
Multi-volume or single-file installer
Includes an automatic yet customisable uninstaller
Provides simple but good customisation of user interface
Can create and manage shortcuts easily
Powerful enough (Can add registry keys, ActiveX controls, and INI driver files)

After trying several installer creator programs like:

I found out that Smart Install Maker is the best. Not in terms of features and power, but in terms of simple yet quite powerful for small business or personal use (See my features list above).

I like the feature of Smart Install Maker where we can create a multi-volume installation package so that we can span the installation package into several disks. Another feature is the LZMA compression algorithm which is very good in compressing files (For example, a 8.2 GB The Witcher game can be compressed to merely just 3.7 GB!), altough the drawback is it's slow in decompressing files. Smart Install Maker also provides a clean user interface, easy to follow and quite powerful for general use.

However this software has several weakness apart from scripting ability which only available to expensive installer creator like InstallShield or Wise Installation. One of them is that Smart Install Maker cannot preview the current installation project (Only background preview). A good example would be like Q-Setup where users can preview what their project will look like as if it is finished. Another drawback is that the interface customisation is pretty simple, you cannot add a custom dialog or change some dialog parts. The last is it has a bug in calculating a decompressed installation size, but it should be able to be fixed in later versions.

Here is a screenshot of Smart Install Maker 5.0.1: