[nathanaaron02]

NOT really sure where this should go. I know it's more of a coding or some such question. But all I'm really attempting to do is burn my portfolio onto a cd, on my Powerbook, to hand out to prospective clients. Does anyone know of any easy way to make the index.html page (located on the cd I give them) automatically open up in their web browser when they insert the cd - as in autostart without them having to actually click on the file? Is this a heavy coding kind of thing? Maybe I'm just not going to be able to do this, but thought I'd ask anyway! Thanks for your help!

[Luca]

I don't know, personally I always get annoyed when stuff auto-starts on me. What you could do, though, is store all the relevant information inside a hidden folder and then have an alias of "index.html" with a different name, like "double click me" or whatever, as the only visible file in the CD. You could also add a background image to the window that opens when you open the CD, to make it more interesting and highlight the file they have to open.

[scrouds]

Quicktime used to support program autostart, but i think thats gone now. Your best bet is what Luca said, a single file with one icon in the window, with some good graphics would look real professional. Autostart (one the one game i had had autostart) was annoying, so i would suggest to stay away from that, even if it were easy to do.

[Brad]

I agree with Luca that auto-starting is an atrocious behavior that is generally more annoying than useful. It's a horror of Windows design that I'm glad Mac OS X doesn't support it the same way.

Forcing the users to do something without their knowledge is a very bad UI decision. It's just as easy to put a single file in a folder with an appropriate label and it increases usability by leaps and bounds.

For a good idea of how to do what Luca and scrouds mentioned, download Delicious Library or OmniWeb or Adium and look at what it gives you when the disk image mounts. It's a simple window presenting an icon with instructions to drag it to your Applications folder. It couldn't get much better than that! You could do precisely the same thing, instead telling the user to double click a certain file to start.

[curiousuburb]

You can certainly make autorun files for Windows, and there are ways for OS 9, but in either case, it is possible that the autorun function for a HW Device is disabled by OS or user, so it's a crapshoot even if you do code autorun files.