What I need is a directory which the user can handle as a single file in the Windows explorer. Does something like this exist? If not, what comes closest?
The closest thing is probably Alternate Data Streams, although those are more akin to MacOS Named Forks than Bundles.
There are also some special cases, for example if you save a website with Internet Explorer you get an HTML file and a folder which are linked together.
Depends on your particular needs. As mentioned above, named streams are possible (on NTFS), however you should notice that not all applications copy files with named streams correctly. In some scenarios regular ZIP archives can work (Explorer shows them as folders). If you are doing software development, there exist libraries that let you store many files in one container file (eg. SolFS).
I think you can create a folder with an extension, e.g. Myfolder.bundle, then you can associate that extension with a custom icon. So it looks like a bundle as far as the end user is concerned.
Related
This may sound like I'm just looking for a .exe file, but I'm not all that familiar with windows. I have been using pyinstaller to turn my apps into binaries. My app relies on a lot data directories and third party binaries that I package within the same directory as the executable binary. For Mac, this makes things easy because the user only has to click on MyApp.app inside the applications directory which is like a link to MyApp.app/Contents/MacOs/MyApp. This way MyApp never has to be touched and is all bundled together with the data directories (also loaded inside of MyApp.app/Contents/MacOs/).
However, I can't really find a windows equivalent. While Pyinstaller can create a directory with my data directories and executable inside of it, if the user ever moves the .exe file inside the directory, the app will never work (because it loses its relative location to the data directories). Is there such a thing that can package this directory like on MacOS so the user just has to click on a single .exe file that links to the .exe inside the directory packaged within it? That way we can just pass around one directory. Like a Mac.app?
Win32 apps store data within the executable file as resources, which allows the single file solution, but they can't be accessed using normal file APIs, there are a separate set of functions for resource handling. (This implies that resources aren't so useful for things that absolutely have to be files, like images of helper executables.)
Win32 also has alternate data streams, which are more similar to what you're used to with .app packages, separating a local identifier from the actual filename by $DATA:. But those only work on NTFS, get lost by many file management applications, never have been very popular, and are now effectively deprecated by Microsoft (by preventing access from Windows Store apps).
For an application I would like to store a collection of files together, and have them appear in the filesystem as a single file so its easy to manage. I am currently storing everything in a folder.
I would like to keep things accessible so you can manually edit the inside contents if neccesary.
One way to do this would be to create a zip archive and give it a custom extension other then .zip. Then it appears as a filetype and if needed you can unpack and access the content, but for normal use keep it hidden.
I can't seem to find a convenient way to do this. Boost and zlib can do the compression but don't work with archives. I found libzip but I have a hard time understanding how to use it and to me it seems that it only reads/writes zip archives without doing the actual compression.
Is there a more convenient way to tackle this?
Can you call system functions for creating an archive on OSX from c++ / Carbon?
Is there another way to make a folder appear as a single file?
In OSX, you can create Document Packages (similar to application bundles) which are treated as a single file in the Finder, but are really just directories with some internal structure.
Apple does not zip these packages, but they do provide the functionality you describe and they can be created and accessed through CoreFoundation by using CFBundleRef .
From the documentation:
... The important thing to remember about creating a document package is that it is just a directory. As long as the type of the document package is registered (as described in “Registering Your Document Type”), all you have to do is create a directory with the appropriate filename extension. (The Finder uses the filename extension as its cue to treat the directory as a package.) You can create the directory (and create any files you want to put inside that directory) using the standard BSD file system routines ...
As 1st step, simple rename the folder and add the extension .bundle, e.g. Myappdir.bundle
That's will show the whole folder as one file with a lego-like bundle icon.
The next step is you must create one Info.plist file inside.
I've developed a GUI for some build scripts, and am now in the process of deploying it. As the script will be deployed to a number of different machines at various points, I need to use the standard format of directories that the team use.
The GUI consists of a ".fig" file that contains the visual definition of the UI, and a m-script that defines the functionality. I need to locate these two in "fig/" and "m/" folders respectively, but I can't figure out how to. I first searched for an include statement of some kind in the m-script, as when I Run it on its own, the error message in the command window states that the ".fig" file can't be found, but there doesn't seem to be a reference to the ".fig" file anywhere, I assume that it's inferred as both files have the same name but a different extension.
I fear that Matlab's GUI system requires that both ".m" and ".fig" files are in the same location, but this will be an inelegant solution that I'd rather not go for if I can avoid it.
The next thing I'm going to try is to call a script that copies the fig file from the other directory to the same location as the m-script, when it is executed, then deletes that copy once the script exits, which again seems a clunky solution, but will allow me to adhere to the team's organisation conventions.
Does anyone else know of an undocumented means of specifying the relative location of a GUI ".fig" file?
You can export the GUIDE-generated GUI as a single .m file. Check out this blog post: GUIDE GUIs in All One File.
I'm not sure if this is a new feature, or one of those things that has always been there...
I would like to generate some temporary files in the course of my application. Specifically, I'm using AVAudioRecorder to record a file that I, upon stopping the recording, would like to load and edit/process. My question is:
What is the appropriate standard place to create temporary files. Is there some generally accepted approach to this for Mac or for iPad programming in general? I don't want to simply create a directory and write files into it if there is a proper protocol to this.
The answer to this question is actually a lot more complicated then one might assume. One cannot necessarily just use NSTemporaryDirectory and be done. I cocoadev.com has some good pages on this topic and I would suggest that you study them yourself and determine what will work best for your circumstance.
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSTemporaryDirectory
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?GettingTemporaryFolderOnSpecificVolume
The usual place for applications to store temporary data is /var/tmp. You could also use /tmp but this directory is for system-generated temporary files and anything in /tmp is deleted when the machine reboots.
What I found was that according to the iOS Application Programming Guide, I am supposed to query for the appropriate temporary folder for my application via NSTemporaryDirectory(). I tried this and it returned a folder within the /var directory, in my case '/var/folders/pQ/pQ+ZqZCSHWSIHftcbIo57U+++TI/-Tmp-/'.
/tmp or /usr/tmp are the usual places to store temporary files in Unix (which Mac OS X and iOS are).
i have an executable for my cocoa application as xyz.app file. But when i copy this on windows, it is showing this as a directory with all the resource files and stuff. Is there any way to create a single file executable on mac also (like .exe file on windows) so as to disable the user from seeing the resource files and other files?
Thanks
You talking about a Bundle, which is a folder that is given an extension and the OS treats it as if it is a single file, while in reality it is a folder with resources in it. The NIB files are stored in this bundle as well as your executable and the info.plist file. This is just the way apps work in Cocoa.
The only way around it would be to write your app in a different language, but i'm not sure which, if any, will give you a single file executable.
What are you storing in your app directory that you don't want people to have access to?
There are ridiculously complicated ways to do that, sure. For example, you could gzip all your resource files and decompress them at runtime. But there's no good reason to do so — all it does is make more work for you, introduce additional complexity and make your app slow. Adobe doesn't do this, Microsoft doesn't do this, micro-ISVs don't do this — it's just not advisable.