[Sudogenic]

This has been confusing me lately - A few Mac programs that I've seen have the extension .exe - I thought this was a Windows-only extension?

If not, can .exe files created in Flash work on a Mac?

Thanks.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by Sudogenic:
This has been confusing me lately - A few Mac programs that I've seen have the extension .exe - I thought this was a Windows-only extension?

If not, can .exe files created in Flash work on a Mac?

Thanks.

Where have you seen a Mac program that used exe? Flash doesn't create .exe files does it? I thought its native file format was .fla and its binary format was .swf.

[registered_user]

The only exe file I've ever been able to do anything was a stuff-it self extracting archive. I presume that the Windows version names those files with .exe extensions.

[piot]

A .exe file produced by Flash is the PC version of the Mac Projector file.

Look in the publish settings.

[larkost]

When it comes to .exe there are a few things to talk about:

The first thing is that if the file happens to have a resource fork that declares that it is a executable (program), then it is an executable, no matter what the file name or extension is. This is how some programs have the .exe extension. Macromedia took advantage of this a few times to create single files that were both macintosh and PC executables... it was never a great idea because you had to be very careful about how you packaged things, and it caused more problems than it was worth.

With MacOS X there are a few similar tricks you can pull with things that are marked as bundles (the bundle bit), so it is theoretically possible to have a proper MacOS X Cocoa application who's .app package actually ends in .exe... I don't expect to ever see them used.

Then there is a last case where you could see this: .Net applications. Microsoft has created a command-line-only (at this point) version of the CLR (Common Runtime Library... the groundwork for C# and .Net) and the applications that the compiler creates are .exe's. So you can compile simple C# programs that use some of the same frameworks as are used for .Net on Windows and create a .exe that is a runable program on MacOS X (in the same sense that a .jar is a runable program on MacOS X).

And to further this, the Mono project is working on porting all of their .Net compatible code to MacOS X, and this includes some GUI code that is compatible with the GUI frameworks on Windows. This means that at some point it might be possible to have large .Net programs from Windows that compile and run on MacOS X. In fact Quark is rummored to be funding the Mono project to create enough of this so that they can create a future version of Quark Express on Mono and have it run on both platforms (plus Linux) with as few changes a possible between them.

[Nacente]

Photoshop has a lot of .exe, being plug-in and routines.