I need to have a flash file be opened and viewed from a USB automatically on both Win and Mac.
I read about various solutions depending on the format of the flash output:
autorun.inf if Flash published as exe(Win)/app(Mac)) which seems to be working only on Win;
html embedding if Flash is published as swf, but this turns into a problem of launching html file.
What is the best known practice/solution?
For the PC, you can use an autorun script. On the Mac, there is no such feature (thankfully). What you can do on the Mac is have the Mac partition open, and using a background image, display instructions to "click here to start", or whatever other verbiage you desire, pointing to your Flash Projector file.
will this help ?
Related
I have a client I am preparing a promotional USB key for. The recipients of this key will be on a variety of operating systems. we are targeting
Windows XP+
Mac OS X 10.6+
And we have a promotional video to be shown on all these systems. We cannot expect people to have a great variety of Codecs so I have packaged on the USB key a portable app of VLC and created an EXE that runs a bat file that plays the video in the portable VLC. All that is good for windows users. I've tested and am happy with this.
For MAC 10.6+ the H.264 codec the video is a part of the Quicktime Player in 10.6 So they can simply double click the video (or symlink, alias or hard link to that same file)
So that's the wind up. Here's the pitch:
On Windows I want users to double click an EXE file I've created
On Mac I want users to double click either a video file (or symlink, alias or hard link to that same file)
on either system I do not want users to see the other option so that they only have ONE thing they are asked to click.
This means I will have both:
Windows-Only-File.exe
Mac-Only-File.m4v
This means I need both:
A way to make a file on a FAT32 USB key show in Windows but not on a Mac
A way to make a file on a FAT32 USB key show in Mac but not on Windows
for all this to happen with default settings. I cannot expect users to set any
I have #1 already. Using the OS X dev tools I can set:
$ setfile -a V Windows-Only-File.exe
And that will hide it on Macs, while Windows machines will ignore the Mac only invisible prop and show the file. I have tested this and it works.
It Seems trickier to pull off #2. I have tried the right click in explorer and set file to hidden in windows thing but that hides it from BOTH OSes. I have tried taking a hidden file and running:
$ setfile -a v Mac-Only-File.m4v
which removes the invisible flag but that removes hidden as well.
I am really out of ideas here. Help???
I've hit a bit of a stump on the road to my goal of creating a screen saver. Before I began this project I did research and everyone urged me to create the screen saver using flash.. in which I did. Now I face the issue of converting it to an SCR (screen saver format for windows) . Now I've done my research and downloaded Instantstorm only to be disappointed by it's lack of 64-bit support and/or Multi-monitor support (Scaled mirroring across screens if resolution of main screen is different from other screens).
Can anyone tell me what is the proper way of creating an animated screen saver from scratch (or from the flash file I created preferably) which is fully compatible with 64-bit and has the ability to display the screen saver on multiple monitors.
Since it's a flash app you may be able to run it through a browser/as a web page. See this post for additional info:
webpage as a screensaver windows 7 and XP?
When I create screensavers, I do it through java, and then use launch4j to convert it to a .exe file. I then rename that .exe file .scr.
If you have issues renaming the file, go to control panel>folder options and uncheck "hide extensions for known file types". You can then rename the file.
P.S. If you are able to create a .exe file with flash, then you can just rename it from .exe to .scr as the extenstion.
I'm creating a FAT32 formatted USB Stick/Drive to ship a product. We'd like it to behave a bit more like the hybrid CD/DVD's that we create:
Insert the disk on Mac 10.6 or later and the drive opens up and shows you a window with the application in it. We can do it from a DMG or CD but the USB drive doesn't seem to want to honor the bless command.
On Windows, we've set up an autorun.inf. On XP it's not showing the icon, label, or opening the specified file. I know that you can't have Windows Vista and Windows 7 automatically open something or add an entry to the AutoPlay list by default, but it still should show the Volume Label and icon.
Here is my autorun.inf:
[AutoRun]
Action="Install My Cool App"
Open="InstallThis.exe"
icon="Ultimate.ico"
[Content]
MusicFiles=false
PictureFiles=false
VideoFiles=false
Are these things too much to ask for a USB stick? Anyone else out there shipping things on a USB flash drive and have overcome these issues?
As of Windows 7, AutoRun feature is not supported on USB drives. Only the following commands are supported:
label
icon
See Improvements to AutoPlay on Engineering Windows 7 blog.
Examples in Autorun.inf Entries do not use quotes for values. Does it work without the quotes?
MacOS might have implemented a similar approach to Windows 7: do not autorun anything from a flash drive automatically to protect you from malware.
I am facing an interface freeze issue with Flash Projector running a flex state based application. A Flash Projector exe was generated from a standalone flash player ver 10.2. The target machine on which the problem occuresd has 10.3.
Basically "screen freeze" means that the user interface is running as usual on Flash Player, but it's not responding to any user input (like button presses). But if we alt-tab to another application, the state changes in the Flash player. There is display with buttons on the screen, but touching the buttons or doing anything else - it did not respond. Rebooting the computer fixes the problem.
Can you suggest why this is happening? Is there any known bug in Flash Player.
The problem is this is being hard to reproduce on the developer workstation as it doesn't happen always. But it happens quite often on the target machine running an Intel Atom N270. What debugging steps can you suggest?
Problem : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z25oV9QWRyk
Have you tried publishing the projector in 10.1 or a version of Flash newer than 10.2? If you are able to publish it as a SWF first, you can use the stand-alone projector exe (downloadable here) to load and create a projector from it.
According to this Adobe bug issue (registration required), version 10.1 was supposed to have resolved this, but it sounds like it may have reappeared in 10.2.
Is there any way to automatically launch an application on USB attach or CD insert on Mac OS X? it's easy on Windows, but I found that AutoRun.Inf does not work on the Mac at all.
You can't. Autostarting applications is impossible under Mac OS X.
The next-best thing, opening the CD folder and showing the installer icon, can be done by using (AutoOpen version 1.0) to make a .dmg which can then be burnt to a CD.
Basically, auto-run is considered a security problem and so is not supported in OSX. Sophie Alpert's answer is also a bit overkill. Most installers for OSX simply open up a folder to show the application and, possibly, a readme. Installing is done by dragging the app to your Applications folder.
For other kinds of apps on CDs (say, a slide show or something like that), the developer generally uses hidden folders to hide support data to ensure that the only thing the user will see when they open the CD is the single icon they're supposed to double click to start the app.
It is possible to install a background service that monitors whenever a USB device is plugged in and then launches an App. Google's "Android File Transfer Agent" is such a service that is running in the background and launches "Android File Transfer" whenever you plug in an Android device.
If you are looking for something for just yourself, you could write a small mac app that runs in the background and watches for a particular USB device (by id) to be attached and then run the program. Ideally a small XML plist could be used to map device IDs to the correct program to run. The XCode SDK has sample code that monitors for device additional and removal to get you started.
I agree with JavaCoderEx. I would crontab a task that looks for /Volumes/*/autorun.sh, then runs it once. Maybe touch a file in /tmp/ so you know its already been run, then remove it if the volume disappears.