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.
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).
I have a folder which contains an executable file (Exec.exe) and a lot of files that Exec.exe needs to run. Currently, it's pretty ugly having all of those files there when I only need to run the one executable. Is there any way to bundle them all into another executable that runs Exec.exe and also contains all of the files Exec.exe needs to run? Thanks for any help!
Yes, but I would recommend you only do it if you need to.
You can achieve this by adding your files as resources in your exe project, so they are added into the exe's binary at compile time. You can then access the files directly from your exe at runtime by using LoadResource and related functions. I'd recommend reading up on the Portable Executable (PE) file format if you're considering this route.
This is the way to do it if you, and again I stress, need to have only a single binary where you can still access your files. There are obvious downsides to doing this, such as it's much more coding to access the data as it's embedded in your application binary, and you can't easily update the files (check out resource hacker tool) without re-compiling your binary to include the new data.
If the only reason you want to do this is because it's "pretty ugly" seeing the additional files in the same directory as your exe, consider moving them into another directory, for example,
from:
MyExeDir
--myExe.exe
--myFile1.txt
--myFile2.dll
--myFile3.dat
to:
MyExeDir
--myExe.exe
--dat
----myFile1.txt
----myFile2.png
----myFile3.dat
or:
MyExeDir
--bin
----myExe.exe
--dat
----myFile1.txt
----myFile2.png
----myFile3.dat
So all the "ugly" looking files are out of the way.
Why don't you create a shortcut of "Exec.exe" and keep it somewhere handy ? If whats that you want ?
Or if you want to distribute your app, you can use Winrar/Winzip (winrar is the best) to create a compressed .exe of your entire folder, making "Exec.exe" as your startup app. Use the SFX option in winrar.
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'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.