Cross Platform Issues

When your project is published and is meant to be available to the widest possible audience there are a few rules that you are advised to follow.

Firstly if you are publishing on to a CD you should include a readme file, in the days of yore readme files were often the first point of contact between developer and user and would contain vital information about the project (usually software) was included. Although nowadays readme files have become somewhat obsolete due to the practise of having autorun CDs and installation wizards but the practise of including readme files has continued to an extent. Readme files generally contain information regarding the correct installation procedure, the developer, and the minimum system requirements. The minimum system requirements are essential when developing software as it is becomes a clear indication if the program will run on the intended system but minimum system requirement are also useful in multimedia projects. A important point to note is if the project is HTML based then just about all computers will be able to run the basic site, it is only additional media and plug-ins that will not function therefore is it often best to give a warning on any links to pages that contain these. Again screen resolution and colour depth will affect the look of the site but it will not affect the functioning of the site, this means that you may wish to include an optimum system requirement as well as a minimum system requirement.

Your project should also not rely on media types that are unique to a specific OS, files like Windows Media Video files are not widely supported and would hamper the distribution of your project. It would be best to use file formats that are supported as widely as possible such as MP3 files. This is a similar argument to native and interchange file formats except on an OS level rather than a software level.

If your project is published to a web site you must either upload it directly using an FTP client, uploaded using an online site manager or synchronise the site using a computer based development suite. Synchronising files is where the software compares files on the computer with files on a remote site (such as PDA, MP3 player or web site) and then uploads any documents that are either not present or have been modified.