Is PackageMaker the right tool for me?

Hi,

I am a designer - sooo far away from the development world, but today I downloaded and started hunting around in xcode 4.3 for lion, even upgraded the OS on all my machines so I could use it, for the right tool to distribute my .kth file and fonts associated with it.

Basically I am just designing keynote themes and I want to be able to give these away, or even charge for them at some point, but after downloading a few free ones today, I noticed that they didn't just give you a folder with a .kth theme and some fonts, but that they actually had an application that distributed the theme to the appropriate folder:
Library/Application Support/ iWork / Keynote/ Themes

So I scoured the web for some help in trying to figure out how to accomplish this and the only thing I could find and make sense of was PackageMaker. So I created my package, even customized the bg and after I built it, I sent it from one of my machines to another. I ran the package on the other machine and it distributed the fonts to the font folder and it put the keynote "pieces" in the folder Library/Application Support/ iWork / Keynote/ Themes. I say "pieces" because it took all of the files contained within the .kth file and kind of burst it open into all of those pieces and the original .kth file is not in that folder anywhere. Obviously, it's not in the theme chooser in Keynote either.

All I want to do is allow someone to download and install these themes and the fonts used in the themes without having to force them to do it manually.

Am I using the right tool in PackageMaker? Is there an easier way to do this? I feel like I've gotten as far as I can considering I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

Any help would be wonderful and so appreciated.

Thanks,

Kristen

I learned what you did the hard way as well.

If you add a folder to PackageMaker (it seems that Keynote themes are), you have to tell it to include the root level. By default, it doesn't do this so it will only include the "children" (everything in the folder but not the folder itself). To fix this, open up PackageMaker, select your Keynote theme > Contents > check "Include root in package."

Vansmith - you're a LIFESAVER. Thank you so much. It worked like a charm.

Kristen

Oh trust me, I had to fight with PM for quite some time to get that solution. I think I only found the answer 8 or 9 pages into an oddly specific Google search. Glad to hear it's working out for you!