Revolution 2.7.3 released, support for U3

[Jim Carwardine]

Thanks, Richard... I wish I had your encyclopedic mind.  This was way
outside my personal experience not ever having owned a PC.  I thought this
may have had something to do with writing apps for handhelds - Rev having a
Palm interface option or something like that... Jim

on 8/12/06 12:45 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> 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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