Hollywood APPBuilder released

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Allanon
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Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Allanon »

APPBuilder is a tool that will increase your Hollywood multimedia language productivity, with APPBuilder you can compile and pack your project with a single click without bothering with long shell commands..

The nice thing of this application is that you can choice for which target platforms you wish to build your sources and what Hollywood plugins your application uses, doing so APPBuilder will manage for you all the boring things like copying the correct plugin version in the correct target platform folder.

But that's not all because APPBuilder can manage for you your application resources, just tell APPBuilder which resources must be included with your application and it will copy all of them in the right folders, including MacOSX application boundles!

APPBuilder can also manage external data: with external data I mean data that must be included with your distribution but that is not essential and should be placed outside the main application folder. Think about a "readme" file, or documentation files. Setting these files as external APPBuilder will copy them inside the build folder but outside the application folder, this is especially useful for MacOSX applications because external files will be placed outside the application boundle and so will be easy accessible by the final users.

One more thing that APPBuilder can do is to create for you a zipped archive ready to be distributed, it uses 7zip so you must have it on your system to use this feature or, at least, you should have a similar program that uses the same command line arguments of 7zip.

Here is a screenshot of the main interface:
Image

APPBuilder can be downloaded from my website here
APPBuilder is also available on IndieGO! AppStore

This software is shareware, but the downloadable version has no limitations but a single window that sometimes is opened to remind you to register the software if you find it useful.
The activation key can be bought on my website or from the IndieGO! AppStore.

You can find more informations as well as the software documentation here
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airsoftsoftwair
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by airsoftsoftwair »

Cool! This should make app maintaining for many platforms much easier :)
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Juan Carlos
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Juan Carlos »

Two questions:
1. The license key is for all versions, because I work under Windows and MorphOS., oK I saw your site and this is Ok.
2. Already are there the all plugins for Linux ARM? for Rapberry Pi for example.
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Allanon
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Allanon »

Hi Juan Carlos,
only a couple of Linux ARM plugins are available, when Andreas will release them I will include them in an updated package :)
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Juan Carlos
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Juan Carlos »

I'll test your program, and if it like me, I'll pay it
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Allanon
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Allanon »

ok, feel free to report problems and/or suggestions ;)
Bugala
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Bugala »

Read the documentation and finally got the idea about APPBuilder. Have to tell rest i too, since i thought about it wrong first.

I first thought it is useful for those who have plenty of files in their proejcts etc. (which it of course is very useful at), but I missed the point that this is very handy program even if you are aiming at having one big exe coming out of your project.

For thing is, you can simply choose the platforms you wish to compile to, click the button, and it makes exes to each different platform. It becomes especially useful if you want to use some plugin.

I remember with Help My Cat! it was quite annoyance as i had one exe and one Ogg Vorbis plugin, so when i made those exes to different platforms, i had to have oggvorbis plugin for each different platform. So this creates a problem of either having plenty of folders for each differnt platform, or manually putting that right plug in to each.

And even worse was when i noticed there was some mispelling and i would need to fix that to the code, and start the progress from beginning of recompiling the exe to each platform. With this, all i would have needed to do, was to change the code, load the "Help my cat" APPBuilder file and click "Build", and they all had been ready for me. Even to the point that this APPBuilder even makes for example zip files from all my platform versions (if i have multiple files and want to distribute it in single downloadable zip-file).

Great thing. When I get my external harddisk to work properly (my machines being replaced) and therefore get my indiego appstore.exe back to use, i will buy the keyfile for this. Definetily going to start using this. This will leave me much more time for programming instead of compiling, and makes even little fixes doable instead of leaving some single typo be due to extensive trouble it would take to recompile everything again.


But one thing however, I have configured putting hollywood exe where it should be and plugins folder to APPBuilders plugin folder, but left 7zip place empty.

Then i have given name to my project "Kings of Israel Board Game", main source as the "main.hws" which resides in Kings of Israel folder, and put executable name as "Kings of Israel", cleaned .info place, left notes as it is. Havent chosen any plugins or compression options, no app resources or external files, and chose only one target "windows", but when i click "Build" it shows me message: "wrong arguments specified!".

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

that main file does link lots of graphics files to itself with @BRUSH command mainly, but i guess that wouldnt really matter? Plus the main.hws does compile fine on Windows IDE. (havent tried making exe, but works when i click "run the current script")
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Allanon
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Allanon »

Hi Bugala and thank you for your interest in this project.

Yes, the main goal of AppBuilder is to save time during the build and package creation phase, especially removing the boring part where you have to place manually the plugins for each target platform where one can easily make mistakes (at least that's for me :) ).

Thank you also for the problem reported, I've already fixed it and I upload an updated version in a couple of days (my Internet speed is not so fast...), the error was given by the spaces in your source path, I forgot to enclose destination and source paths with double quotes and this have generated the error!

I will post here when the new version will be ready for the download :)
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Allanon
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Allanon »

Ok, I've updated AppBuilder to fix the reported issue, please download it from my web site or IndieGO! AppStore, it should work now :)
:)
Bugala
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Re: Hollywood APPBuilder released

Post by Bugala »

Got bit further this time with the new version, but got a new error now: "Cannot write to file C:/Program Files (x86)/Hollywood/APPBuilder/APPBuilder/20150504-192212/Windows/Kings of Israel/Kings of Israel.exe !" (slashes point the other way, but couldnt figure out how to get them typed).

Just in case mentioning if it makes any difference, that last time i saved the hprj file and this time simply loaded it and tried to build it again.
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