Fun with Windows installers. Wait, did I say fun?

Coming to you live from my Surface Book 3 running Windows 11. Windows used to be my daily driver (except for Linux in movie VFX that is), but then I went all MacOS when I started to dev for iOS. This is so weird lol. Aaaanyway.

Why am I here? The looping plugin I'm working on will also run on Windows, but to get it ready I have to make an installer. Gave myself a week to sort this out, but looks like install/uninstall is already working. It's been like, a day. The thing that really annoyed me though wasn't the guts of it, it was discovering that to codesign my work, juuuust to codesign it, the digital certificate costs $340 for one year. What on earth? It's included with api/sdk, TestFlight, beta test tools, code safety reviews etc that comes with the $99 Apple Dev fee. I never thought I'd see Apple being significantly cheaper than a Windows counterpart, but here we are, in the upside down world.

For now I think I'll go with unsigned code, at least until I know that people actually like this plugin.

Here's some useful stuff if you want to make your own installer using Inno Setup, which seems to be pretty great so far:

1. Customising the banner graphic
2. Custom installer theme