mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg) (04/15/88)
There are several solutions to the Appleshare execution problem.
They aren't foolproof, but they might take care of 99 and 44/100 %
of your problems.
Solution 1: If your environment consists of mostly floppy based
machines, make the applications too large to fit on a floppy. Add some
new resources (call them NOPs or even something inconspicuous) which is
large enough to make it larger than 800k. It will no longer be finder
copyable to a private diskette. Note that this will take up more disk
space on your server, but it will not interfere with any of the caches
since that large resource will never be loaded off the disk.
Solution 2: Make the support files finder invisible. Applications will
still be able to find most of them, but the program as stolen will be
less useful. It also reduces the desktop clutter for people who just
want to use the program!!! Eg. You can make Microsoft Word's Help
file, Dictionary, and Hyphenation file invisible and everything will
work just fine.
Solution 3: Don't make the real application visible. Make it, as is,
invisible as in the previous solution. Make sure to do this at the top
level of the directory hierarchy - this ensures you won't have
frustrated people who double click on their document but it can't find
the application. So you ask, how do I launch the real application?
Create a small application in the your most yummy compiled language.
The complete Lightspeed C code follows:
main() {
Lauch(0, "\pServerDisk:Microsoft Word");
}
Note that you do not have to initialize anything - doing so will take
longer and will reduce any feedback the finder the finder provides to
the person waiting patiently at their Mac (such as the watch cursor).
Build this launcher application, giving it the same icon as your real
application, the same SIZE (this might help Multifinder), an FREF, a
BNDL and all those other good things. Name it something similar to
your actual application. If the actual application is called Microsoft
Word, call this one Microsoft Word 3.01. Similar names means that no
matter how people start up the real application, the finder puts up a
similar name.
When somebody clicks on this launcher application, it will immediately
launch the invisible (but still quite there) real application. If the
user clicks on one of their documents, the real application will be
directly launched, making the whole process even faster.
Suggestions, comments?
I'd be happy to construct this for anyone without the technical
resources to do it. I offer quick professional consulting, although
most of this is pretty straight forward to do if you are comfortable
mucking with Mac files.
Mike Rutenberg
(503) 771-5516
--
Mike Rutenberg for fast, robust food and software (503)771-5516