Building An Autorun..

gord

gord

gord

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2003
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Hi all,

Bit of an odd one that I know little about..

Basically, I will be distributing materials on a USB stick and wish to have a splash page for for the contents of the stick so that users can easily load the files without looking at the file structure/explorer.

I am wondering what the options are for this? Do the CD autorun options apply to USB?

The issue I am struggling with is that the stick contents will change and I cant manage updating the menu for each one. The menu has to be dynamic and pull the filenames from the stick and put them in the menu. Unfortunately I don't have any application programming knowledge, which I assume is what I need.

Anyone have any advice? Tips? Links to what I might need?
 
Indeed, I've done some reading. Unfortunately it appears there is no way to avoid the autoplay feature in windows. But you can configure an autorun.inf to make it so the first option is to run the usb stick, which can then load what I want..

However, what I want is more complicated because I need to pull the contents of the usb stick and put it in a nice splash screen page. So I was thinking maybe Flash could do it with an SWF and some actionscript.

Thoughts?
 
flash would work although relies on the client machine having flash player installed

alternatively use html and fire internet explorer from the autorun

iexplore.exe filt.html
 
I dont think HTML gives me enough power to pull the contents from the flash drive.

I need something more powerful, .net, Java, Flash.. but my skills are limited. Yet for the ones that pulling the contents out is easier I dont understand gui creation and for Flash vice versa.
 
howler said:
flash would work although relies on the client machine having flash player installed
Click to expand...

If you export to exe you do not need the flash player installed. It generates a Flash Projector which is a standalone exe that runs without the player installed.
 
Interesting. Is flash powerful enough to script so that it gets the contents of the usb stick and lists it in a menu?
 
I think it is with ActionScript 3.0, you can make use of the function fscommand() to execute shell commands such as executables on the momory stick. ActionScript 3.0 also has a lot of useful methods in the flash.filesystem namespace that be used to recursivly search a directory for files.

You could use this to dynamically build a list of executable files on the memory stick and then have a button or link that allows you to run the file. I think it is definitely possible if you have a little ActionScript 3.0 knowledge.
 
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