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Separate stacks for Mac Standalones

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:10 pm
by david_ff
I have a project with 4 separate writeable stack files, plus the main stack (which is not written to.) When I make a standalone for Windows, I get the main stack as an .exe app, plus the four writeable stacks as separate stacks. When I make a standalone for the Mac OSX, there is only one icon, and somehow the four writeable stacks are included in that.

A user of my standalone for the Mac somehow must have corrupted the stack, because now, while the main window of the main stack opens, clicking the "Start" button does open any of the writeable stacks. So I have two questions:
1. Is there any way to recover the hidden writeable stacks in this project?
and
2. In the future, how can I make standalones for the Mac that operate like the Wndows standalones, in that they provide the main stack application, but keep the writeable stacks separate?

Thanks,
David

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:47 pm
by andyh1234
Im sure someone will be able to give you a better answer, but on a Mac the file you see is actually a package which contains all the separate files.

If you right click on the file and select 'show package contents', this will then show a folder called 'contents', and this in turn contains a few folders, one of which is called 'MacOS' and this seems to contain the stack files.

Its quite a neat way of distributing the app as you just have one 'file' to distribute, but we have found it can cause problems if the stacks are writeable and a non admin user tries to open the application and modify the stack as assuming the mac user has put the app in the applications folder, other users do not always have permission to write to the applications folder.

There are lots of places you can safely store data on the mac, the library folder works for all users, as does the documents folder. Our apps check to see if there data in these areas on startup using the 'if platform is "macos"' rather than write it to the stack files as this seems to avoid the permissions problems.

It also avoids issues when you deploy an update, if the user were to update and just drag the package to their applications folder, they wipe out all the data in the existing package.

Andy

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:51 pm
by andyh1234
Sorry, just to reply to point 1.

If you have a Mac and the user could send you the files, you might be able to recover them this way.

If you dont, you could talk the user through it, just ask them to right click on the application icon, then click on show package contents.

They will then see a folder called 'Contents'. If you then ask them to right click on that and select 'Compress contents' this will create a file called contents.zip which they can then drag over to their desktop and send back to you so you can have a look at the files and see if you can work out what went wrong.