Revolution 2.7.3 released, support for U3

[Richard Gaskin]

Jim Carwardine wrote:

> This appears to be a PC only upgrade.  Is that true or does the Mac OS
> version contain the U3 stuff?  Jim

At its core, U3 is just a novel interface to a feature built into the 
Windows OS:

On Win, any read-only volume can have an autorun.inf file in its root 
directory which causes the OS to automatically run whatever file is 
specified in that INF file whenever the volume is mounted.  This is how 
Windows CDs have been commonly made for more than a decade, to the point 
that today Win users so expect the CD to "do something" that if you 
don't use an INF file they'll call your tech support to report that the 
CD is "broken". :)

U3 merely tricks the OS into making autorun.inf files runnable from 
flash drives, by partitioning the drive so that one partition (the one 
that contains the menu application) is read-only.

Partitioning is simple and soon many non-U3-member vendors were offering 
custom partitioned drives (you can order these from a great many vendors 
around the web), so U3 went further to differentiate itself with the 
recent addition of the auto-shutdown feature and a couple others.

Because the core of the U3 experience is dependent on a Windows-specific 
OS feature, currently U3 can only deliver that experience on Windows, 
and no on Mac or Linux.

And because Apple has explicitly expressed a disdain for the security 
risks introduced when any auto-run feature is added to an OS (they had 
this in an early version of QT, but after it was used to spread viruses 
they yanked it and vowed to never do that again), it seems unlikely that 
Apple would risk losing the advantage they currently enjoy in being 
perceived as more secure than Windows just for the modest benefit U3 
provides.

Perhaps the coolest thing about U3 is that the vendors using it have 
really helped pushed the notion of delivering applications on Flash 
drives, which helps not only the millions of customers who buy U3 drives 
by the order of magnitude more who buy non-U3 drives.

And as Rev developers, it's always been a trivial matter for us to 
deliver fully self-contained apps which run from removable media without 
needing to modify the host computer.  While Rev's work in the 
U3-specific additions are helpful, you can also deliver portable apps on 
ANY removable drive, U3 or not.

For the benefit of developers looking to deploy to the full range of 
Flash drives on all major operating systems, a discussion group has been 
formed to explore ways of establishing simple common directories and an 
open source player to make it easy for developers and simple for their 
users:

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/U4-Group/>


--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com