@Brian: I vastly prefer when disk images are used, actually.
Think about it. If you have, for example, a .zip file, you need to either extract the whole thing, effectively tripling the space used by the same data (or more or less, depending on compression), or use a separate app to view and extract an individual file... but you can't ACTUALLY view them, or execute them, just see the filenames.
In a DMG, mounting it doesn't take more space. You can see, execute, and preview all the files, again without using more space (yes, there are a few limitations, but they're rare). You can extract the files you want, where you want, without wasting space.
On top of that, it comes with built-in MD5 checking of the data, so you know immediately if you have an accurate download, and it's WAY faster to access the data in the image than in a zip (try it: re-mount a 500+MB image. Re-extract a 500MB zip file).
I use DMGs for archiving images, because I can see thumbnails, show them off without extracting, and preview large numbers of them without extracting several-gigabyte archive files. It's basically not possible to do with a zip what you can do with a DMG.
@Brian: I vastly prefer when disk images are used, actually.
Think about it. If you have, for example, a .zip file, you need to either extract the whole thing, effectively tripling the space used by the same data (or more or less, depending on compression), or use a separate app to view and extract an individual file... but you can't ACTUALLY view them, or execute them, just see the filenames.
In a DMG, mounting it doesn't take more space. You can see, execute, and preview all the files, again without using more space (yes, there are a few limitations, but they're rare). You can extract the files you want, where you want, without wasting space.
On top of that, it comes with built-in MD5 checking of the data, so you know immediately if you have an accurate download, and it's WAY faster to access the data in the image than in a zip (try it: re-mount a 500+MB image. Re-extract a 500MB zip file).
I use DMGs for archiving images, because I can see thumbnails, show them off without extracting, and preview large numbers of them without extracting several-gigabyte archive files. It's basically not possible to do with a zip what you can do with a DMG.