IDEA: A manager for manually installed software

[antonov2754]

Situation:

Microsoft Windows has "Control Panel/Programs and Features" application to control the installed software. However, not all software has installers or need one. Some programs are downloaded as .zip archives and can be unpacked to any directory.

Idea:

1. To have a full list of all installed programs. This could be done by adding information to standard Windows "Programs and Features" application.

2. Ability to "manually install" an application. I imagine it as
a) right clicking a folder or zip archive
b) selecting option "Install to..." in context menu
c) a dialog appears to choose a human-readable application name and destination folder (default is "Program Files/Application name")
d) clicking Ok and files are copied to the destination folder

3. Ability to uninstall an application. By clicking the "Uninstall" button in "Programs and Features". Deleting the destination folder will be enough.

Improvements:

It would be nice to
- check if the destination directory is empty before installing. If not, ask the user for action (probably he tries to update the application?)
- remember exact files installed, and at uninstall ask if the user wants to delete files that were added later. It will keep documents and savegames.

Thanks everyone for help.

[antonov2754]

Never mind, I found a program almost exactly fitting my description. And it works.

ZipInstaller v1.21
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/zipinst.html

[doctorfrog]

This might take you about halfway there:

NirSoft ZipInstaller: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/zipinst.html

Right click on any ZIP file to "install" it like any other program, complete with an uninstall entry in the Control Panel applet.

edit: welp

[c.gingerich]

My FastUnzip Snack can do this also. FastUnzip Snack