Minimalist's MAC App Creation

This is for fresh beginners of MAC to quickly package an application in the .app format.

Usage

• Clone / download this project.
• Put my.app dir under your /Applications/ dir. Rename as you wish.
• Modify Contents/MacOS/main.sh accordingly so that it invokes your executables.

Before any modification, you can try open my.app from CLI to test whether it works. It should open this project repo with your default browser.

Case Study

JabRef is my current favourite reference manager. I started to use it on Linux. Although there is an OSX package on the download page of JabRef, MAC does not execute it (prompt "damaged package" and the only option is to cancel or move it to trash). Nevertheless, it's written in Java and they have jar archive for download. So I use that jar and execute it with open JabRef-2.9.2.jar or java -jar JabRef-2.9.2.jar from CLI. After two months' use in this way, I think having an app package is better. Then I can start it from Spotlight or other app launchers. It's simple:

• Download this project.
• Put my.app under /Applications/ dir and rename it to JabRef.app
• Download the .jar file and put it under Contents/MacOS/.
• Modify Contents/MacOS/main.sh:

#!/bin/bash

_dir=`dirname $0`
_fn=`basename $0`
cd $_dir

open JabRef-2.9.2.jar

Your minimal layout of the app looks like this:

You can now launch it from spotlight:

OK, it's running now:

Extensions

Icon

You can add a custom icon to the app

• Put the icon under Contents/Resources
• In your info.plist change/add

<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>iconfile</string>

The diff shows you more intuitively how an icon is added.

Further

• Read more about the motivation and reference.
• Go to the blog post for a discussion.

List of minimal Apps created with this repo

• https://github.com/hupili/mma-hkbu-vpn

License

MIT