Apps in folders (Re: A modest VFS proposal)

[Phil Dawes <philipd parallax co uk>]

Tim Moore wrote:
> 
> Fortunately untrue. In fact, it *was* duplicated on NEXTSTEP (which was
> Unix-based). The way it works is clever. Instead of making one big
> monolithic file, it actually had one big monolithic directory, called an
> app-wrapper or bundle, which contained *all* of the files that an
> application needed. The clever part is that it made the directory look
> like an atomic entity -- an application object. So if you had an
> application called Foobar, it would be packaged like this:
> 
> Foobar.app            # This is a directory
> Foobar.app/Foobar     # The executable
> Foobar.app/Foobar.ico # The icon
> etc.
> 
> But all the user would ever see was Foobar.app, which was displayed with
> the icon it contained, and when double-clicked would run the executable it
> contained.

Cool. Risc-OS on the acorn archimedies and risc-pc also did this. If the
folder name started with a '!' then it became special 'runnable' foler
which contained gubbins in special files for the application icon, the
runnable app etc.. The user simply double clicked on it to run the file,
or if they held down shift and double clicked it then it opened the
folder.

e.g. !Edit, !Draw etc..

Cheers,

Phil.