The Braun Blog

I was working on a project for my father-in-law where he wanted to distribute his yearly catalog via CD instead of the traditional printed method.

I wanted to design a CD image that would work on both Windows and Mac.  I was able to solve the PC side of it pretty quickly, but needed some guidance on creating a DMG on the Mac.  They can get pretty fancy.

My wife designed the background art for the DMG when it is opened and with some guidance from a few different sites, I was on my way.

Peter Ahe’s Blog was helpful in getting me going on the right direction and understanding what was required to get the disk image installer created.

Some other good resources:

How to Create a Hybrid CD on the Mac
http://www.sonsothunder.com/devres/revolution/tips/disk006.htm

How to Create a Custom DMG Installer
http://www.ploem.be/blog/?page_id=26

One thing that has always been a struggle is how to perfectly center an object (for example, a DIV) both horizontally and vertically on a page. 

The other night I was searching for a better way to do this via CSS instead of using nested tables.  I came across Dead Centre, a website that demonstrates exactly how to accomplish this.  You can see some of the detail on the webpage itself, but also take a look at the source for more details on how this was executed.

This provided a truly dynamic design that was 100% CSS-based and works across all browsers.