I'm mainly write iPhone apps but am familiar with some desktop Mac authoring. I need to create a Cocoa app that will include several wav sound files (included in bundle). I don't want a user viewing package contents of the .app file and then extracting all of the sound files from it. Is there a way to protect those files?
Here are some possibilities, depending on the effort you feel like putting in:
Encrypt the files
Change the filename and extension to make it less obvios that they're sound files
Embed the sounds inside an executable file, as a custom Mach-O
section
Strip any headers from the files, and store just the raw
samples
Write a program to convert the audio data to C array
declarations, and compile into the app
Just don't worry about it. Nobody's
going to "steal" your sounds, and if
they did, so what?
You can encrypt them. That's about it.
Related
A company I work with have an issue where a zipped .app file is resolving into its bundled folders once unzipped.
What is the best way to compress an .app so that it can be decompressed without that it resolves into folders, that is the want it to remain a single .app file?
Use another format than zip? Compress it in binary?
Thanks in advance
You shouldn't be having any problems with this. As I'L'I points out, an application on the Mac is a bundle of folders. It's just that the Finder presents it to the user as a single entity.
Zipping and unzipping the bundle won't change this. The Finder recognises the .app extension and acts accordingly. It is not necessary to set what used to be called the 'bundle' bit on the top-level folder. That would get lost by round-tripping the app through a .zip file, but that's not important anymore.
So the real question is, how are you inspecting the unzipped copy of your app? If it's via the command line, or some other tool that doesn't know (or care) that apps are really bundles then you will indeed get the behaviour you describe, even with the original.
I couldn't find any way to break the Finder's 'single entity' view of an app, even if I deliberately damaged it but maybe you have found a way. If so, I'd be interested to know how you did it.
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).
So I have been working on a few projects using audio and images from files in Visual Studio C++. As of now they are just test projects, but I am going to be moving now towards making 2D games for fun using SFML and a few different audio libraries. The problem is this, I want to give out my games to others so they can play and test them, and I may try to develop some sort of Multiplayer for some, thus increasing my desire to give it out to others, however I do not know how I can give them the games with all the files included. I used to just be able to grab the exe files out of the debug or release folder, but these projects have files they rely on.
So here is my question, is it possible to export an exe file that contains all the other files (wav's, jpg's etc.)? If this question sounds overwhelmingly stupid then tell me, because I have very little idea of what an exe is, and whether it can hold those files (I am used to java, where u can simply export something into a runnable jar and because it is an archive, with all of the resources prepackaged in there, I don't know if an exe shares these traits). If this is not possible, or there are better alternatives, what are they? I have seen things and know how to load sounds from arrays of data, would that be a better solution? Or are there other options? On top of that, in the debug and release folder there are several DLL files which I need to run the project, is there a way to compress these into the exe or will those have to be in the same folder as the exe no matter what?
The real question here is what is the best way to export an exe file of my project so that I can utilize all of my sound and image resources as well as the dll's into an easy to distribute copy? Thank you in advance to any advice.
It's not possible to export an exe that contains your exe and multiple other files. You can use an installer (such as InnoSetup, which is free), or bundle the extra files into a resource and load them from resource at runtime. (The first has the benefit of being able to ask the user where to install, create shortcuts and folders, Start Menu items, etc.).
There's two easy ways to make a file that you can easily give to people to test and/or play your game.
The first option is using an installer, as mentioned in Ken White's answer. It's a good method for "final" releases, but it adds an extra step if you just want to send a copy of your game to someone to test it.
The second method is put all your files into a single .zip file (or .rar, or .tar.bz). Basically, this is a lot like Java's .jar file, with all the dlls, image files, and sound files into a single file. Recent versions of Windows have the ability to create zip files built in, so the best way to do it is just zip up the Debug or Release version with all the files, and unzip to an empty folder somewhere, and test the game. Doing that will let you make sure you got all the files you need. This way, you can easily send your game to someone, they can simply unzip it to a folder somewhere, and play, no messing about with installers.
The bonus third option is sticking the files into a resource and loading them at runtime, or similar things (it's possible to get really fancy and combine all the files into a single EXE, but it's not exactly easy, and not really advisable).
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.
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.