Autorun.inf starts things automagically for Windows

For the Record:


Your Mac can burn CD's that leverage technologies like web pages and Flash .exe files to make presentation materials for Windows users. An easy way to distribute a CD of images is to make web pages of the images (using, say, iPhoto's built-in export to web page) and include an autorun.inf file on the CD. The autorun.inf file is a text file with the commands a Windows PC will run when the disk is placed in the PC. In the below example, the autorun.inf file tells the PC to automatically open the index.htm file. You can replace the index.htm with whatever file is the first web page of the photo web pages (you may run into trouble if the web page has a space in it).

[autorun] 

open=start index.htm

If you are bundling a Flash .exe file, just make the autorun.inf read:

[autorun] 

open=flash.exe

...where flash.exe is the name of the Flash .exe file you created.


Update: BBEdit makes good autorun.ini files. For added safety, select "Convert to ASCII..." from the Tools menu and make sure the line breaks are set to DOS. You can set the line breaks from the fifth menu button on the window or from the Options... button of the Save As dialogue box.