For my first technical post I’d like to offer a workaround to a common problem that I’ve found when publishing Mac Projectors (.app format) on Windows in Adobe Flash CS3 all the way up to CS5.5 (possibly CS6 as well). I’m hoping Google indexes this as soon as possible since there seems to be a lack of information on this issue…
Those of you who are familiar with compiling Mac projectors on Windows may know that the file appears as a folder instead of an executable. Often times this file will load on some Mac computers but not others, or none at all. Well it turns out that this may be due to you using a NTFS file formatted hard drive. I suppose some files aren’t written properly to NTFS due to this folder formatting of the .app on Windows, so you need to compile straight to a FAT32 formatted drive if you want to maximize Mac usability.
Workaround:
Step 1) Find a USB drive somewhere that’s formatted to FAT32 (or format one yourself, and always remember to first back up your files from the drive before formatting)
Step 2) Set up your Flash IDE to publish the Mac projector straight to the USB drive.
Step 3) Use a archiving program such as WinRAR (confirmed to work with WinRAR) and zip up the .app directly on the USB drive.
Step 4) You can now move the zipped archive from the USB drive anywhere else and distribute to your Mac users!
It’s a silly workaround but works, and I hope that Adobe addresses this eventually. I recommend always having a drive somewhere that’s formatted FAT32 (or has a small partition for FAT32) since the Mac environment tends to favor FAT over NTFS.
Hope I’m able to help someone with this issue!
This really did help Cleod, thanks!
I thank you also thought about the Fat 32 !!! ..
Thanks
This helped me a lot when I was going nuts trying to figure this out. Thank you.
Did not work in my case. Windows 7 with CS6.
I’m sorry to hear that, I’ve tested this with CS5.5 and CC but not CS6. I don’t think that’s enough to make a difference but you never know. The best alternative for cross-platform desktop development is to use Adobe AIR. Believe it or not, AIR is just a wrapper for Flash with extra features so it’s extremely easy to port a Flash application over. Definitely look into that.