Hi,

I have taken on a small project which involves creating a CD/DVD with some HTML files that is going to be given to people who use PCs and Macs.

I need the CD to automatically open a web browser and display the first page, which would be index.htm, (or html if it matters)

I can do this on a PC, no problem, but it didn't do anything on the Mac I tested it on and I was wondering if you guys and gals knew of a way of making it happen.

Thanks in advance,

John.

I don't think there's a way of autorunning from a CD on the Mac. I may be wrong, but it's been that way since virtually the beginning.

Your best bet is to make it obvious that someone needs to double-click the HTML start page to get things running.

Apparently Apple stopped CDs autorunning in Mac OS X (for whatever reason).
This link may be of some assistance to you.

Mark

At best you could make the CD open a Finder window showing the contents...

I have seen trickery to hide the Windows content of CDs on OS X, you could try that and only show index.htm ?
I'll have a dig around...

This might help:
clicky

I think after there was a worm scare in OS 8/9 the autorun thing was rightly thought of as Bad Idea. I may be wrong, but I remember there being updates after that came to light.

Autorun is a bad idea. I have it disabled by policy on all the Windows machines as work.

Thanks for the replys guys. I'll have a look at the links when I get home, but it's beginning to look as though the OS X users may have to double click the html files... ho hum

You could auto run CDs - it was an option in your System 8 control panels. The problem was that there was a virus for the Mac doing the rounds which relied on CDs auto running. The advice at the time was to switch that option off. I guess that’s the reason why.

This might be a silly question, but as I don't have a Mac I don't know, but what happens when you put magazine* CDs/DVDs into your computers? Do they autorun, or do you have to double click an icon?

I'm thinking MacUser type mags... Oh, hang on - that still sounds dodgy

Most Mac mags that had/have discs won't have an auto-run feature at all, because it generally won't work. Usually the disc just mounts to the desktop and you double-click it.

From there, if there's a "Start Here" type icon, you can run the application by double-clicking it.

Anything that autoruns in my book is a pain in the ass. I may be stuffing disc into my machine as I work on something else. I don't want to find my work interrupted by whatever the disc contains. But that's just my jaundiced and grumpy view of such things.

I even find the OS dialog window "youve just put a disk in the drive - what do you want to do with it" annoying.

You know you can turn that off right?
System Prefs>CD/DVD> Change the drop down from Ask What To Do to Ignore

The Autostart Worm.