I'd rather get a .dmg than a .zip with an executable in it.
most of the good ones have a "drag to applications folder" shortcut inside of them inside anyways so I don't see the problem with that particular convention.
You are used to it. So am I. If you use a stupid design often enough you become immune to its failings. The concept of disk images is needlessly complex, confusing and way too abstract.
You download a file that is a image of a disk, you have to mount that file, you have to drag the contained app to wherever you put your apps and then unmount the disk image. Can’t you see the craziness of this approach?
On a Mac your app is a single file (it isn’t, but behaves that way) you can drag anywhere and if you don’t like it anymore you trash it. Delivering your app with a .dmg breaks this simple model. Suddenly this app you see sitting there must be first dragged somewhere before you can use it (and you don‘t even get a warning if you don’t). And you have to handle a completely virtual disk image as if it were some real disk. Crazy.
So why did .dmgs become the preferred method of delivery in the first place? I'm assuming it has something to do with the fact that there's an HFS filesystem inside, so metadata/resource forks/whatever are transparently retained? Or is it just because you can run programs from within it without extracting them (which is quite useful when you have, say, the 1GB XCode .pkg)?
I guess it would be best if you could just download the app. But, since it’s a directory (bundle), that’s not practical.
Zip, however, seems to become a sort of standard wrapper for those kinds of bundles. iWork’09 files are just zipped bundles so that you can easily send them via email and nothing breaks if you do.
most of the good ones have a "drag to applications folder" shortcut inside of them inside anyways so I don't see the problem with that particular convention.