Placeholder Icons Don't

I gather from the manual that it’s supposed to be the case that icons placed in a layout are placeholders for the items which will eventually be put into a DMG, but regardless of where I place icons, they just wind up in a grid in the final DMG window layout.

In order for this to work, the placeholders in the layout must have the same names as the files in the source folder that you drop onto DropDMG.

Ah.
That negates the usefulness for the purpose I intended.

I was trying to make layouts with different backgrounds and numbers of icons, to be used when making disc images for ever changing items, but it isn’t practical if I have to alter the layout for every new image.

Would be great if placeholders were simply replaced by files and folders in some choosable sort order: kind, date, filenames…

I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at here. How would the files be matched up with the placeholders in the layout. Do you mean that you want placeholders for “newest file,” “second newest file,” etc.?

That’s the essential idea.

For instance, if I have a folder with an application, an RTF readme file, a web site link, and a folder of related scripts or documents, it would be useful if I could choose a configuration which specifies a layout including 4 placeholder icons and then specify the order they’re to be replaced.

Hey!
What would be even better would be if the placeholders were numbered in order to specify the order in which they were to be replaced, and then if the files and folders to replace them could be given a sort type such as alphabetical, date, kind, etc.

By kind, I mean being able to choose a sequence of priority like: applications, folders, text docs, web links.

Don’t mean to be telling you how to write your app, and as it is, I use it almost every day. But that’s the kind of functionality which would make what I do much easier. Until now, when I needed a layout, I’ve typically used some other app and carefully placed items by hand. Would be nice to just pick a configuration which has 2 item placeholders when I need an image with 2 items.

Thanks for explaining. By the way, something you might want to try now is using detached layouts. You could drag and drop a layout to the Finder to export it, then edit the names in the plist file (perhaps even via script). This might be easier than dragging and dropping things manually into DropDMG.

So there is no way to do this even for a single file/folder you are dragging into DropDMG?

For example ${APP_BASENAME}

Not currently, although I will be adding support for that type of placeholder in the next version of DropDMG.

DropDMG 3.2 adds this feature.