Mac specific: universal binaries

[Robert Cummings]

Hiya,

I am just starting with mac. I have product ported to the mac but do not know how best to present it. Will it be a an image, a folder or what? Mostly, I want to make it what mac people expect.

Any advice appreciated

[Red Marble Games]

It's not clear whether you're talking about the package in which people download your game, or the way it's presented once it's decompressed and on their disk. For the former, it's really either .dmg or .zip format at this point; too many people lack the formerly popular StuffIt to decompress .sit files. For the latter, people expect all of your resources etc. to be inside the application bundle, unless it's user-modifiable content, and in that case you have to be careful with permissions or else store those files in an appropriate place on the user's hard drive, such as ~/Library/Application Support/.

Mark

[Jon Trainer]

Most Mac software is distributed using a DMG (disk image) format. Sometimes this image is then zipped, sometimes not.

There's a really good shareware tool that many people use to produce nice DMGs for distribution called DropDMG (http://c-command.com/dropdmg/). It's cheap and works really well.

I would suggest visiting Version Tracker (http://www.versiontracker.com) or Mac Game Files (http://www.macgamefiles.com/) and try downloading some games or shareware to get an idea of how things are packaged for distribution.

[Robert Cummings]

Thanks guys. I'm finding mac stuff really hard - its actually difficult coming from years of pc abuse.