OS X Standalone (mis)behavior

[Devin Asay]

I have had some bizarre problems running a standalone app created with 
Rev 2.2 on OS X. The app is created on my G5 running OSX 10.3.4 and 
then copied up to a file server (an Xserve running OS X Server 10.2). 
When I try to run it on my lab iMacs (also running 10.3), the launch is 
unsuccessful. The application icon "zooms" but never appears in the 
dock. At first I thought perhaps it was a permissions issue, so I 
changed permissions on the server to give ownership to the generic user 
that I use to log in to the file server. No luck. However, if I log in 
to the server from my lab machines using the administrator login, it 
launches normally.

Now here's where it gets weird:
I went back to my development station, the G5 and logged in to the file 
server as the lab user. The app launched and ran normally. But when I 
logged out and back in to the server as administrator, the app would 
not launch! In other words, the failure behavior was exactly opposite 
depending upon whether I logged in from my desktop G5 or one of my lab 
iMacs.

I was about to chalk this up to some weird permissions/ subnet thing 
(the labs are in a different subnet than my desktop machine), but then 
I dropped back to Rev 2.1.2 and re-compiled the standalone, copied it 
up to the server, and it works the way it's supposed to: Log in to 
server from anywhere using the lab user login and it works.

This makes me suspect the Standalone Builder in 2.2.1. A couple of 
other curious clues (though they may be red herrings):

- When I try to examine the Info.plist file in the application bundle 
created with 2.2.1 I am unable to open it with the Property List 
Editor. BBedit opens it but complains that 'The UTF-8 file "Info.plist" 
is damaged or incorrectly formed'. The Info.plist file from the app 
bundle created with 2.1.2 opens normally. (It's also not UTF-8 encoded. 
Significant?)

- In the 2.2.1-created app, no version information appears in Get Info 
or preview, even though I entered in the Standalone Settings before I 
built. In the 2.1.2-created app, I see version information as expected 
in Get Info and preview.

Any ideas? Maybe I'm doing something wrong when I am building the 
standalone under 2.2?

Thanks,
Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University