I’m looking to find out a clean method of deploying a USB key to a customer, that once inserted into the computer (both Mac and Windows), will auto load a respective "thing".
The "thing" could be either an application, a PDF, a splash page (html) in a web browser (system default browser), or potentially an AIR application. The problem with AIR is that I’d need the user to install AIR potentially. Since AIR is platform independent, that could work out pretty well I’d think.
I have established what will be my windows autorun.inf, to load up either AIR, or a portable browser with the splash page. And on the Mac, the user will get a folder (with a graphic background) and a link to launch the page (in a browser, or the portable browser all together). I’m looking for best practices for something like this ultimately.
Autorun isn’t generally possible anymore because of the negative security implications.
You’re better off making sure that your disk image is set to open a finder window on load, and that the background encourages people to (manually) run your content.
A similar option to an AIR app, but with even less overhead, are Flash projectors. They have fewer features, but are portable and lightweight.