On Mar 5, 2010, at 11:58 AM, Xochitl Lunde wrote:
I have recently spent several days testing with the
DMG Canvas tool from Araelium group. http://www.araelium.com/dmgcanvas/
Version 2.0 released last month does build backward compatible disk images
from Snow Leopard and the background does show up for me. There's
a Preferences menu in the DMG Canvas drop down from the menu bar, and you
have to check the box to enable backward compatibility. (I am only targeting
Leopard and Snow Leopard, I haven't checked Tiger.)
I noticed that they state on their web-site that it's a problem Apple acknowledges but doesn't intend to fix. I know Apple sometimes doesn't worry about backwards compatibility much, but come on...
I have noted a few things when building:
* Leopard and Snow Leopard wrap
text at different widths. I can't seem to get around this. Because
my background has a very "inside-the-box" feel, I've had to mess
with the font size to get it to fit on both platforms.
* When I build for backward compatibility
using Snow Leopard, DMG Canvas changes the way the file name text appears.
Instead of having text wrap, it is only allowed to be a fixed size
which looks just a little wider than the icon itself. So my Applications
alias can show up as "App...ns". To get around this, I
made the icons bigger, and the text smaller. It still doesn't look
as good, and I am still getting around to trying the other suggested packaging
tools.
I don't think that text wrapping will be a show stopper for us.
So far, I only really got to try out the FreeDMG alternative
suggested from kelleycomputing.net. I didn't like this one, I didn't
see a way to add a background image. I started trying the iDMG tool
from nscoding.co.uk, but I was slightly confused when it came up and so
I have only gotten partway through reading the manual.
I took a look at both of those, and they seemed a) clunky, with poorly designed interfaces and b) poorly documented, which is often connected to (a) a bit. On the other hand, if I can make them do what we need, it'll be worth the pain. iDMG didn't appear to help with the background images.
I also ran across DMG Packager. They say they have a fix for the image problem with SL, but haven't had a chance to test it yet
. . .
Can you point out any of the web discussions you referenced?
I would like to see those too, because I think you and I are trying
to do similar things. My software is also built on Snow Leopard only
because some of our developers only have Snow Leopard.
I'll see if I can track down the links. I wasn't saving pointers at the time.
Was DMG Canvas one of the commercial disk image builders
you tried? Which ones have you tried that have not worked? I'm
planning to try the following if time allows:
No. We've been looking at DMG Architect, iDMG, Free DMG & DMG Packager. We've been talking with the folks at DMG Architect about the problem, but don't have a resolution. I need to do more testing with DMG Packager before I know how that'll work. Just ran across it.
* FileStorm (haven't tried yet)
Haven't tried that yet either. I didn't see a manual for iDMG anywhere. The download just has the app. Where did you find it?
Kevin
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