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.
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Creating an application with PortableApps in mind
+ 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.
-
- Accept a parameter which tells your program where to load the settings from
- The launcher will then launch your app with this parameter, set as
$EXEDIR\Data
- Load the settings from
../../Data
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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.
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)
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.
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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.