Creating an application with PortableApps in mind

miquelfire (Homepage) - January 19, 2007 - 3:59pm

I'm making an application and would like it have a native portable edition that can be installed easily in the PortableApps menu, however, I can't see a clear way to do that just yet. It seems almost everyone has only dealt with apps they know too little about to do anything but make a native version to run from a key.

( categories:

Portable App Development

)

Here's the layout

Ryan McCue

(Homepage) - January 19, 2007 - 7:15pm

+ YourAppName\
-+App\
--+YourAppName\ (contains the actual app)
--+DefaultData\ (usually copied over in Data on first run)
--+AppInfo\ (Details coming soon when John releases the full format)
-+Data\ (all settings etc go in here)
-+Other\ (source, anything else)
-+YourAppName.exe (usually launcher, can just open app)

Basically, you need to load the settings from Data\
You can do it multiple ways.

1. Accept a parameter which tells your program where to load the settings from
2. The launcher will then launch your app with this parameter, set as $EXEDIR\Data
Load the settings from ../../Data

----
Ryan McCue
Person 1: Oh my god. You will never believe what just happened.
Person 2: What?
Person 1: I can't remember, I've forgotten.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

Any reason why my app can't

miquelfire (Homepage) - January 19, 2007 - 9:35pm

Any reason why my app can't be in the root (YouAppName) directory, and only the launcher can be there?

Also, I didn't notice any instructions for making the installer (BTW, currently the App alone may not see the public light until Summer, maybe Spring if I'm lucky with the amount of time I can spend on it)

There is no sig

Oh yeh

Ryan McCue

(Homepage) - January 20, 2007 - 7:43pm

No reason, you can put your app there if you want.

The "installer" is a 7-Zip self-extractor which contains the YourAppName directory. Once it has finished, you rename the SFX to .paf.exe
Once John gets the PAF specification finished, the installer will be a NSIS installer, which will do basically the same thing.
----
Ryan McCue
Person 1: Oh my god. You will never believe what just happened.
Person 2: What?
Person 1: I can't remember, I've forgotten.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

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Creating an application with PortableApps in mind

Here's the layout

Any reason why my app can't

Oh yeh