Thanks, GetMem. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. ... I think I'm still missing something. I opened my application file (right click, Show Package Contents) and navigated to the /Contents/MacOS folder. Into this I copied the executable (file whose icon is black square with 'exec' in green text) and my db file. Regardless of whether I'd changed the DatabasePath string or not, I'm still getting the same error message if I double click on the resulting application file (which, in my case, looks like it's just the application name ... no .app suffix, etc.).
It's humbling to be such a newbie!
thanks again,
al