Acknowledgements: 3 Great Tools

Here are some invaluable tools we used for DemolishPairs.com.

With the release of Demolish! Pairs and a number of other projects in the works, it has been a busy time here at Digital Gamecraft.  We finally got around to finishing the DemolishPairs.com web site (for now :)).  Now, I want to acknowledge three of the tools that proved particularly important to that task.

The first tool, and one of the most important in my arsenal, is Beyond Compare by Scooter Software.  I have mentioned before (and will probably continue to do so) that this is a product that I use almost daily and it is extraordinarily useful.  It performs both excellent file comparisons/”diffs”, showing (in this case) what changes we have made in HTML or code, and fantastic synchronization of files, so we can tell at a glance which files are updated and then copy changes to the servers (usually after verifying the diffs).  After using this tool, Dreamweaver is lacking and Expression Web is downright painful, so we exit either tool to publish with Beyond Compare instead.

The next tool is 3D Box Shot Pro, by Jellypie Software, which does a lot more than merely box shots.  For our iOS app, it generated wonderful 3D images of the screenshots on iPad and iPhone devices, which you can (finally) see on the Demolish! Pairs web page; they really make the page look much better.  I especially want to thank Andrew Gibson for actually generating these images (and more) and opening my eyes to the benefits of this software.  Here is more information and a short video showing how to make a 3D iPhone (or iPad) model with 3D Box Shot Pro.

The final tool is CSE HTML Validator by AI Internet Solutions.  This software validates your web site by checking your HTML (and CSS, etc.) files for issues that either will or could cause problems, and helps to make your site better all-around.  (It is like PC-lint for web sites: essential.)  Having used all of the validations in Expression Web successfully, I foolishly assumed that everything was fine with the site, but Dexter Bell (developer of FileBoss) pointed out that I had made a fundamental error with my HTML/CSS.  The tools from Adobe and Microsoft let it slide, but HTML Validator flagged it right away.  You can get an idea how thorough the product is with an online validation (but if you check mine, you may see that the iTunes link Apple provided me is invalid 🙁 ).

If you are developing a web site, I strongly encourage you to check out all three of these tools to help make your job easier, better looking, and more robust.

Carbon nibs update

A spurious warning appears to be spurious.

In my last post, Carbon nibs under Lion, I gave a solution to the problem of Carbon nib (interface) files not being supported in Xcode 4, while Xcode 3 would not run under Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).  That solution was to run Interface Build 3.2.6 and convert the nibs to a newer format.

Toward the end of the post I mentioned that many windows in the converted nib files produced a warning: “This window’s content rectangle does not lie entirely on the screen with the menu bar and may not be completely visible for all screen resolutions and configurations.”  In testing, these files did not exhibit any errant behavior, but shipping a product, even a beta, with build warnings is against our development guidelines.

Since that post (and in preparation for a proper build, without warnings), I did a little research and experimentation and discovered that the problem appears to be a minor issue with the conversion, where the resulting data is aberrant enough to generate a warning, but is handled correctly in the resulting application.  Although I did not dig deeply enough to identify the exact source of the problem, it is related to window positioning (as one may have guessed).

The solution, oddly, is simply to open the offending nib file, select the (or each) window, click on the Size (ruler) tab in the Inspector, and then drag the window position image, even slightly.  As far as I can discern, any movement (within the simulated window) fixes the problem; at least, it fixed it for all of my affected windows.  Clearly, the size of the windows was not the issue, since that was not changed, and the position should never have been a problem, either, for windows with the ‘Center’ attribute enabled (as most of mine were).  I also note that the windows I created from scratch since moving to this Lion/IB 3.2.6 setup were unaffected.

One other idiosyncrasy to note is that the build process also produces the following message: “View is clipping its content.”  It is not a warning, just a message, and I assumed that it was related to the above warning until the warnings were fixed.  It is a straightforward message, albeit with no reference to the specific view involved, so I looked into find the problem there as well.

As it turns out, there is a very useful tool with IB 3.2.6 to assist with this.  Select ‘Layout->Show Clipping Indicators’ to enable a feature that displays a small “+” at the bottom of any view that is clipping its content.  I never noticed this setting before, and it can be very handy.  Alas, it also reveals (in our case) that the messages are just pointless chatter, since they are being given for list views with extra columns that are intended to scroll horizontally.  Fortunately, they do not produce a warning message, so the messages are easily ignored; in fact, they only appear on the full build log, so I may have never noticed them had I not been debugging a nearby warning.

[The most meaningful comment that I received for the last post was (seriously), “I’ve a cockroach on my pillow.  Wanna see it?”  The days of technical development posts may be numbered.]

Carbon nibs under Lion (Mac OS X 10.7)

Apple’s overly aggressive deprecation sucks.

If you are still maintaining a Carbon application for Mac OS X, you may have stumbled upon a serious issue with handling of nib (interface) files in Xcode 4 under Lion, and if you have not yet, you probably will soon.  Hopefully, this post will help you resolve problems or avoid some of the pitfalls.

The Problems

Apple marches forward and aggressively deprecates development technology.  In this particular case, they release Xcode 4 and only allow submissions to the Mac App Store from the latest version, forcing developers to upgrade.  We are maintaining and enhancing a product that was developed using Carbon, based on Apple’s (then) recommendation for cross-platform products, and was about 90% complete when they announced its deprecation in favor of Cocoa.

Additionally, we upgraded to Lion (to properly provide customer support), unaware that the latest version of Xcode 3, version 3.2.6, would not install or run on Lion.  Instead, we could only download and install Xcode 4.1, which does not provide support for Carbon nib files.  With Snow Leopard, we could download both versions normally, but from Lion, the Xcode 3 download link is removed and Xcode 4 is only available via the Mac App Store.  More accurately, the installer is available via the Mac App Store; you still need to find it in Launchpad and run it before Xcode is ready.

There are two particular problems that occur with Carbon nibs in Xcode 4.1:

First, there is no editing capability for modifying them, so when you highlight a Carbon nib, the editing window only displays an Interface Builder icon, but (importantly and annoyingly) there is no message that editing is not supported.  Unless you already know that is the case, you will waste some amount of time attempting to figure out how to activate the “integrated” Interface Builder.

Second, the build tools provided cannot process the older nib files, so you will get a message similar to the following: ‘error: ibtool could not strip “Main.nib” because it is not a valid Interface Builder document.

Of course, there are a few obvious options here.  If you stop upgrading your development system, you can still build on Xcode 3.2.6 under Snow Leopard, except that you cannot submit to the Mac App Store.  You may be able to have both versions in parallel, but that is not an option on Lion at all, and the nib build issue still exists in Xcode 4 (although the solution to that is provided below).  Finally, you can give in to Apple’s strongarm tactics and rewrite your application to use Cocoa, but that is not always feasible, economically or otherwise.  (In our case, we are trying to maintain our products and support our customers while we rewrite it with Cocoa.)

Or, I suppose, you could flip Apple the bird and abandon their Mac platform; that has crossed my mind more than once, but it is not really an option for us.  Instead, I found a way to resolve the two main problems above, without too much effort.  (That is, it will be fairly easy for you readers; it took me significant time to figure this all out.)

The Solution

To resolve the inability to edit Carbon nib files within Xcode 4, take advantage of the fact that Interface Builder was an external tool with Xcode 3, and that it does run in Lion.  Simply copy Interface Builder 3.2.6 from a (Snow Leopard) partition on which it is installed to the Lion partition.  It should be located (by default) in the ‘/Developer/Applications’ folder, and note that it must be copied to the same directory on the Lion partition after Xcode 4.1 is installed.  (It will not run properly from a different folder, and the Xcode installer apparently removes it [so make a backup copy].)  Since Xcode will no longer launch (the external) Interface Builder automatically, you will probably want to make an alias for it in a convenient location.

Then, to resolve the build problems with the older nib files, you must use the separate Interface Builder tool to covert your nib files to a newer (XIB) format.  This is accomplished by opening each nib file in IB, selecting ‘File->Save As…’ from the menu, changing the ‘File Type’ to “Interface Build Carbon Document (XIB 3.x)”, and saving.  You will then need to open your project in Xcode, add all of the new .xib files to it, and delete the older .nib files.  Clicking on one of the .xib files in Xcode will show/edit it as an XML file (instead of just an icon) but, of course, you will probably only want to edit it in your newly installed IB3.

There may (read: probably will) be other issues, both with Xcode 4 itself and with the newer SDKs.  For example, we use one (and only 1) function defined in ‘QuickdrawAPI.h’, which has been removed from the OS X 10.7 SDK, so we had to back down to the 10.6 SDK (plus each SDK has different versions of the zlib library available).  Also, several of our windows from (converted) nib files produce a new warning: “This window’s content rectangle does not lie entirely on the screen with the menu bar and may not be completely visible for all screen resolutions and configurations.”  (We dynamically adjust most of our windows anyway, so it appears to make no difference, but we have yet to eliminate these warnings.)

Nevertheless, making the above changes will allow an older Carbon-based application to be built on Lion using Xcode 4.1, leaving you free to discover more fun and excitement.

[If you find this information useful, please leave a meaningful comment.]

Disk Images Revisited

There are some issues under Snow Leopard.

In a blog post last year, I gave detailed instructions on Making Mac Disk Images Pretty.  Unfortunately, I have discovered that the most recent version of Mac OS X has some issues of which developers should be aware when using that technique (not that there is any obvious alternative).

I recently upgraded my development system to Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).  Apple is fairly aggressive with requirements for its development tools,  and I need to upgrade in order to use the latest iPhone SDK.  Of course, I already had a Snow Leopard partition that I had used for testing, so I knew that our software would work, and I never experienced any previous problems.

When the time came to build an update for one of our products (FreeCell Plus 4.00/4.01), I had a few minor niggles with Xcode 3.2.1 (the latest version), described later, but I got the product built and packaged properly.  Then it was time for testing on our other supported versions of Mac OS X, Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5), and I was surprised to learn that, although the software itself ran flawlessly, the disk images showed no background image when mounted, and the folder size was wrong.  The icons were in the correct locations, relative to the top left corner of the window, so the formatting was not entirely ignored, just effectively ignored.

After some research into the problem, I found the answer in this DropDMG forum thread, where it is stated that Apple has confirmed this as a bug in Snow Leopard.  I moved DropDMG over to my Leopard partition, rebooted to that version of Mac OS X (10.5), and build my packages there.  That solved the problem, and the background images showed in all supported versions of OS X.

Conclusion: In order to have background images appear in disk images on older versions of Mac OS X, you must build the disk image under Leopard or earlier, not Snow Leopard.

Caveats: Sometimes, when opening a prepared disk image under Snow Leopard, there is a blank space on the bottom (probably not coincidentally exactly the same size as the folder toolbar), which does not appear on other versions of Mac OS X.  Also under 10.6, the folder toolbar includes a slider control for quickly changing icon sizes (a.k.a., fouling up your layout).  I have not been able to determine the cause of the former issue (yet) nor the reason for the latter.  (How often does one actually change icon sizes that this is even remotely necessary?)

There were some build issues with Xcode 3.2.1 under Snow Leopard.

As I mentioned, I experienced a couple minor build issues after the upgrade to Xcode 3.2.1, both of which were addressed, albeit with differing degrees of success.

First, the default compiler in the latest version of Xcode is GNU 4.2, which is incompatible with the 10.4 (universal) SDK, and the very first build let me know that.  Faced with a choice, downgrading the compiler to GNU 4.0 versus upgrading to the 10.6 SDK, I chose the latter, which I saw as the path of least resistance (see “Apple is fairly aggressive with requirements for its development tools” above).  Unfortunately, at least for our project, the 10.6 SDK does not function as advertised and, despite properly setting the target OS to 10.4 (and obviously not using any 10.5 or 10.6 features), a product built with the 10.6 SDK will not run under Tiger (period), although it does work under Leopard.  I switched (back) to GNU 4.0 and the 10.4 SDK and all was well.

Second, the latest version of Xcode upgrades its tools (obviously), and one seemingly innocuous change to the linker was to eliminate the need for the “-mlong-branch” compile option for certain object files (generally kernel files, which means primarily for Apple and not so much for the rest of us).  Unfortunately, a warning message was added to that effect, yet Apple did not update its PPC object files accordingly.  As a result, every time one links a universal binary (supporting PPC), the linker throws this warning: “Object file compiled with -mlong-branch which is no longer needed.”  The only permanent solution is to recompile certain (protected) development files oneself, or wait until Apple fixes the problem.

The latter issue is extremely annoying to me, because now I am in the position of either ignoring linker warnings, which I never advise, or spending hours (or days) figuring out how to rebuild a portion of the development tools.  Can you say, “not my job“?  Personally, from my experience of Apple over the last few years, my bet is that this problem will soon be addressed by a campaign to suggest that developers should not continue to be stuck in the past supporting PPC systems.

Does anybody want a piece of that action?

Windows 7 Escapes

Microsoft releases its latest operating system.

Last week, Microsoft published Windows 7, the successor to Vista, to some fanfare.  The reviews have been fairly positive, perhaps because Vista softened the audience, but it seems that the sales tag line should be “Windows 7: what Vista should have been.

We tested the new operating system, in a couple of virtual machines, by running Sun VirtualBox virtualization software.  My first impression was that this was a great productVirtualBox, I mean.  Although I have not yet delved into the advanced features, it did exactly what we needed with a minimum of fuss and bother.  We were able to test both Windows 7 x86 (32-bit) and Windows 7 x64 (64-bit) on the same 32-bit Vista host system without serious problems.  In fact, the only problem we experienced was an inability to find a 64-bit sound driver through Windows Update (so our x64 VM did not have sound).

Back to the operating system, we found it to be perfectly adequate.  It performed as expected and was easy to use (for somebody already used to Vista, anyway).  There is nothing particularly revolutionary, but (as with the update from Windows 98 to Windows 98se) everything seems to be more polished, with a few minor features added.  The big change, really, is that the 64-bit version is becoming mainstream (whereas the 64-bit support for the previous versions was not quite ready for prime time).  It is for this reason that I am likely to upgrade my development system to Windows 7 x64 in the near future.

Some of the changes include the ability to “pin” an icon to the task bar (replacing the Quick Launch toolbar), and a new management feature for task bar (a.k.a., tray) icons, allowing the user to control when these icons are displayed or hidden.  In order to encourage users to make use of this feature, Microsoft kindly made their own icons here very ugly, so the first customization item is to get rid of them.  (This will also facilitate ignoring the loads of useless preinstalled junk that comes on some new computers.)

As far as developers are concerned, nothing much has changed.  As long as your software is Vista-compliant, it will probably run unmodified under Windows 7. All of our recent product releases worked just fine; the only items noted were the (now) missing Quick Launch toolbar and the task bar icon disappearing (i.e., being hidden) after its first appearance.  The only significant caveat, though, is that 16-bit applications (those built for Windows 3.1) will not run (directly) in Windows 7 x64.

Of course, I do have a couple of recommendations for Microsoft to consider in the future.  First, they should probably do a better job of considering the symbolism they (perhaps, inadvertently) put forward.  The default wallpaper for the beta and release candidate versions of Windows 7 was a male Siamese Fighting Fish, also known as a betta.  (“Get it?”)  The latter name may be punny, but the fact that these fish (at least at the pet store) have to have separate enclosures because they are nasty and do not play nicely with the other fish suggests that Win7 is intended to be likewise.

Also, perhaps underlining the above weakness in Microsoft’s overhyped marketing capabilities, I will point out that they had great successes with Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 (standard version numbering), as well as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000 (release year numbering), moderate successes with Windows 286/386 (hardware support), Windows NT, and Windows XP (opaque version lettering), but commercial failures with Windows Me, Windows Vista, and even Windows (1.0, initial release) itself.  I suggest that Microsoft stop trying to “evoke” some greater vision and stick to practical version identification.

Finally, I note that the “Starting Windows” screen of Windows 7 is the best feature of the product, nearly perfect for its purpose.  It is too bad that the same design was not carried through to the system icons, which really are a step backwards in aesthetic terms.

2009 People’s Choice Awards

Only two days left to vote!

This year, the leadership of the SIAF (Shareware Industry Awards Foundation), the group which produces the Software (nee Shareware) Industry Conference (SIC) each year, made the unfortunate decision not to present the Shareware Industry Awards this year. These premier awards were basically the Oscars of this industry, voted on by other industry members, and represented peer recognition. No SIA was presented for any standard game category last year (2008), so our own Pretty Good MahJongg was the last game to win one of these prestigious awards for the 2007 Best Non-Action Game.

In the absence of the Shareware Industry Awards, the People’s Choice Awards take center stage at the SIC banquet (presumably). With no nomination process, and voting open to anybody with an email address, there is no particular anticipation for these awards (and with no game PCA presented since 2006, even less for us). Nevertheless, I will support the awards process, so I submitted my ballot today.

The deadline is looming [Monday, June 15th], but if anybody has not yet voted and still has time to do so, we would certainly appreciate consideration of some of our products:

Although I certain could have done so, I did not fill all seven lines on my ballot with our games. I did an evaluation of the products that I use on a regular basis and which greatly aid my (development) productivity, and these products really stood out:

  • Beyond Compare is an absolutely indispensable part of my development toolkit, and I use it almost daily for code diffs, file syncing, single line editing, and even viewing of Japanese/Unicode resource files (which VC6 cannot handle).
  • Inno Setup is the easy choice for creating professional installers, and though it is not shareware, it is downloadable (free/donationware).
  • Help & Manual is simply the best help editor I have ever used (though I will admit to preferring version 4 without the ribbon interface).
  • PC-lint is critical to my C++ programming work and it is run, literally, alongside my compilations to guard against both silly mistakes and serious errors in order to help keep the quality of my code as high as possible (although there is no downloadable trial version, unfortunately).


To vote for the 2009 People’s Choice Awards, simply register to vote [Editor’s note: invalid link has been removed] (with just name and email address) and then follow the link that will be emailed to you and enter up to 7 software products. Easy.

A Tale of a Good Anti-spam Tool

Spam, spam, go away… You are not welcome ANY day.

My approach to my primary email address, from the very start (more than 13.5 years ago) was that potential clients and customers should be able to contact me without jumping through hoops, so I have never bothered to hide or obscure my address: seelhoff@sophsoft.com . I have always published it in plain view (and to do otherwise would now be closing the barn door long after the horse has bolted and gone on to live free and happy until dying of old age).

Of course, this also allows any spamming slimebag with an address harvester to easily add me to each and every email database on the planet, so I do get spam. Lots of spam. To be honest, though, the level of spam to my “open” account seemed to plateau fairly quickly, although I never really kept track. Over the years, it may have been slowly and steadily rising, but I know that my patience has been slowly and steadily declining, so a while ago, I added some tools to stem the tide.

Let’s talk numbers, first. Since the beginning of April, my primary email account has received 75,000 email messages. Of those, almost exactly 98% are spam. Of the other (legitimate) messages, 80% are business (1.6% of the total), and the remaining 20% (0.4% of the total) are personal. Both of these categories include active mailing lists, such as Carbon and DirectX development (business) and community events (personal). I set up my email client to automatically sort these (and marketing messages) into appropriate folders, and the number of messages specifically to me, from clients, customers, family, and friends, is just a handful per day. These are the only ones that actually hit my inbox and trigger a notification sound.

To be honest, not all Bayesian filtering is created equal, and my email client is probably about average. It handled much of the junk, but an annoying number of spams were being missed, and signalling me (incorrectly) that I had a legitimate message. When I finally had enough, I downloaded and installed POPFile upon a recommendation from somebody in the ASP. I had been leery about installing an interim mail server on my system simply for filtering email, but it turned out to be an excellent choice.

After several months of training, POPFile is 99.92% accurate selecting among business, personal, and spam classifications and, importantly, I have gone for more than a month without a false positive for spam. (Most of the classification “errors” are simply unclassified messages that need to be trained.) Used in series with my email client, I can review messages that either think may be legitimate (ideally, to never miss a valid email), but I am only notified of incoming mail if they both agree on the validity. This has greatly reduced interruptions and made my days more productive.

Of course, there is some training involved so POPFile can “learn” the difference between legitimate messages and spam, but the initial process goes pretty quickly (and when one averages more than 1000 messages per day, there is lots of data). If I were to start all over again, I would not have chosen to have business and personal messages separated, since that distinction is not particularly necessary for me (and not always clear, either, such as when a family member reports a server problem, or a business associate invites me to a party).

If you are looking for an anti-spam solution local to your own system, I strongly recommend POPFile.

Making Mac Disk Images Pretty

This is how to add that “curb appeal” to your Macintosh disk images.

Important update:  Be sure to read Disk Images Revisited, the quick synopsis of which is that this method does not work properly on Snow Leopard due to a Mac OS X bug.  (Building disk images under Tiger or Leopard works fine.)

In a previous posting, I explained the basics of making Macintosh Disk Images for software distribution. By following that method, using free tools from Apple, you can create a basic disk image (.dmg) file that is suitable for downloading. The only problem is that, when mounted, it appears simply as a plain window with the bundle (and any additional files) in it. Utilitarian, at best.

We wanted something more like this:

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.0

This gives a much better initial experience, being not only more visually appealing, but also providing some initial instructions (text in green). Note that the ‘Pretty Good Solitaire’ and ‘Readme’ icons are live, while the rest of the window is simply a background image. In addition to this display when the disk image is mounted, we also wanted to add a license agreement before that happened.

We accomplished what we wanted (the image above being an actual screen capture from our upcoming release), and this is how we did it.

First of all, this can be accomplished, in theory, using the ‘Disk Utility’ and other free tools included with Mac OS X, provided a certain amount of legwork both in figuring out and then in executing the process. Upon a recommendation in the private ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals) newsgroups, however, we tried and settled on an inexpensive third-party tool called DropDMG, from C-Command Software. Not only does this save time and hassle, but it provided an added feature that we did not even know we wanted. (The trial version is fully-featured, and for only $20 the decision to purchase took no deliberation.)

Even with this tool making life easier, it is important to note that the process is slightly convoluted, primarily because one needs a relative path to background image. In our first few attempts, we managed to have backgrounds that showed only on the development system, but disappeared (rather, never appeared) when downloaded to another system. The basic approach is to create a writable disk image first, with the desired contents (including the background image), then arrange this malleable window as desired, and finally convert that into a final (read-only) disk image for distribution.

The first step is to create the desired background image (which is left as an exercise for the reader); it should probably be a non-lossy PNG file for best results. This file should generally be “hidden” in the disk image, and (according to warnings I chose not to test) needs to be in a subfolder, not the root of the disk image. The most common, even ubiquitous, recommendation is to make a hidden subfolder and place the background image in that. However, we took a slightly different tack, by way of the following trick:

Add the background image (say, install.png) to your product bundle in Xcode. Our software has a ‘resources’ folder that contains various images used in the game, and by simply copying the background bitmap there and then adding the file to the project, it is included in the application bundle. This way, there is no messing around with an extra folder just to hold a single file, and if a system is configured to show hidden files, there is not a rogue “.background” folder icon floating around, messing up the layout. (The drawback is that the bundle is slightly larger, but the download size would be essentially the same, and an extra 100K on a hard drive is negligible these days.)

Once you have the background image created and included in your project, follow the setup process in the original post, by creating a distribution folder (named “Pretty Good Solitaire 2.01” in our example) and copying your application bundle and any other files/documentation (e.g., “Readme.txt”) into it. This will serve as the basis of the final disk image, so make sure that everything is up to date.

Now, this is where DropDMG comes into play. Launch this application and create a default configuration for writable disk images (which we, creatively, called “writable”). Select ‘DropDMG->Preferences…’ from the menu, and then in the dialog box, for ‘Format’ choose “.dmg Read-write (can be modified)”. Frankly, the other settings do not matter much here, so leave the default values. Finally, select ‘Save Configuration As…’ (Command-S) from the ‘Configuration’ box and save this configuration, then close the window.

Next, select “writable” (or whatever named you chose) in the ‘Configuration’ box of the ‘DropDMG Status’ window. Then, simply drag the distribution folder onto this window, and a disk image will be created and placed (by default) next to the distribution folder. The log file will reflect this action (as in, Created “Pretty Good Solitaire 2.01.dmg”).

The next step is to mount (and open) the writable disk image, which can be done simply by double-clicking on it in Finder. This window can then be configured as desired, including resizing, setting icon sizes and positions, and (of course) changing the background image. Here are the steps that we take to do this:

  1. Press Command-J (‘Show View Options’).
  2. Under ‘Background’, select the ‘Picture’ radio button.
  3. Click on ‘Select…’ to choose the background image.
  4. Select the mounted disk image (under ‘Devices’).
  5. Press Shift-Command-G (‘Go to Folder…’).
  6. Type the name of the application bundle (e.g., “Pretty Good Solitaire.app”).
  7. Browse ‘Contents’ for background image file (e.g., “resources/install.png”).
  8. Click on ‘Select’ button.
  9. Resize window to fit background image (if necessary).
  10. Reposition icons as desired.

Once you have this done, unmount the disk image, and the layout configuration will be saved. (You can double-click on the .dmg file again to verify this.) Note that it is essential that the background image be selected from the disk image itself (see step #4); otherwise, the link will be to a file on the current system that will (most likely) not be on a user system, and a plain white background will be used instead.

If you want to include a license agreement in the disk image, one that must be accepted before the disk image is mounted, then you will need to add one in DropDMG. Honestly, this part of the interface leaves a little to be desired, but to avoid confusion, here are the basic steps:

  1. Press Command-L to ‘Show [License] Agreements’ window.
  2. Press Command-D to ‘Add [License] Agreement…’ (name).
  3. Type a name for the new license agreement and click ‘Add’.
  4. Select the new license agreement in the window.
  5. Press Shift-Command-D to ‘Add Language…’ to that agreement.
  6. Choose a language and click ‘Add’.
  7. Double-click the added language and insert text as needed.
  8. Repeat previous three steps for each desired language.

At this point, return to DropDMG preferences again (DropDMG->Preferences…). This time, create another configuration for your specific product. Under ‘Format’, select “.dmg zlib-compressed (Mac OS X 10.1)” (or another read-only option at your discretion). This will be the format of the final distributable disk image.

Under ‘Options’, you can select the license agreement added above, if desired. Check the ‘Use custom icon for mounted image’ option. This is the bonus feature that we did not even know enough about to know we wanted. Instead of a simple disk icon, when mounted the disk image shows a disk icon with the bundle icon superimposed on it (which you can see in miniature on the title bar in the example above). There is a way to create a truly custom icon, but we did not feel the need to go that far.

Also check the ‘Auto-open image window after mounting’ option, which causes your window landscaping to immediately appear to the user when the disk image is mounted, as intended. However, do not check the ‘Internet-enable’ option, as this will cause the contents to be automatically copied into the download folder, skipping all of the hard work you just did to get to this point.

Save this configuration (Command-S), close the preferences window, and then select the new configuration in the ‘DropDMG Status’ window. We are in the home stretch now…

Drag the writable (and beautifully landscaped) .dmg file onto the DropDMG window. This will begin a conversion to the new, distributable format. The action will be reflected in the log (as in, Converted to “Pretty Good Solitaire 2.01-1.dmg”). Rename the brand new disk image to something appropriate and upload it. Of course, you definitely need to thoroughly test it, as you would an installer for a Windows product, but if you followed these directions accurately, it should work for you. [Insert disclaimer about me taking no responsibility for your results whatsoever…]

Done.