packaging up Glencoe text books

[tlarkin]

Hey everyone,

This is an academia specific question about Glencoe digital text books. First off, to rant, this company is horrible. They create their text books with some flash front end app that loads PDFs and the flash executable is hard coded to the CD. So, it has to run off the CD. Like anyone in a 1:1 is going to hand out thousands of CDs. So, what I am doing as a work around is just loading the PDF files on the HD and having the students just load each chapter individually.

What I want to accomplish is have the app itself actually redirect to the proper folders so the students can actually utilize the whole app itself. Normally, you can just view the contents of a package, then find whatever configuration file points to the hard coded CD path and modify it to point to the full path of the PDF files and other resources. However with this flash app front end you cannot do that.

I have been on contact with these developers many times over, and basically they told me that we paid for the license and I would have to chop it up myself to get it to work and they will not support me. I am going to encourage our people in charge of buying text books to look somewhere else next time, but in the meantime has anyone ever successfully packaged up one of these digital text books, and how did you do it?

I have tried making a disk image of the CD but still cannot find away to change that hard coded path of the optical drive and I am toying around with this method currently. Any insight or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Tom

[davelb20]

Thomas,

I haven't worked with those books, but just curious, can you create links on
the local computer to mimic the directory that is hard coded into the flash
application

Dave

[tlarkin]

David,

That is exactly what I am trying now, creating symbolic links for the
flash executable to the file path of the folder I am copying the
resources...I am not sure how I feel about deploying a package with sym
links though. Seems like it could possibly break?

Thanks,

Tom

[davelb20]

Tom,

The links could break. Another thing you might want to look out for is, if
you drag a link directly into composer it will be resolved into a copy of
the file that link represents. If you drag a folder with links inside of
it, the links won't be resolved, you'll just get the links.

My other suggestion is to download a hex editor, and open up the flash app
they distribute. If they hardcoded in the path you may be able to search
for it and modify it (Not Fun).

Dave

[tlarkin]

New plan,

Calling the person in charge of the text books to see about getting a
new company in here. I don't think we are under contract and I actually
got someone to let me evaluate before we buy. I will email Glencoe
Support one more final time telling them I want to edit their app and
see where that gets me.

hex editor, hahahahaaha that is a good one. I almost spit my coffee
on my iMac reading that :)

Thanks for your help,

Tom