Tag Archives: iphone

Ad-Hoc Apps and Entitlements

I’ve been banging my head on my desk all day over this, but hopefully I’ve stumbled onto the right solution.

I’m building an internal iPhone application, and am using ad-hoc distribution profiles to get it onto people’s phones in house. Trouble was, for some reason I kept getting the error:

The application “foo” was not installed onto “bar” because the entitlements are not valid.

(something to that effect)

Now, I had my Entitlements.plist file; I had get-task-allow unchecked; the provisioning profile’s application ID was a wildcard that matched the start of the application name. But still, no dice. I generated new app IDs, generated new provisioning profiles a dozen times, but still couldn’t install it on any phone.

What I did try, though, is in the project’s build settings: there is an entry “Code Signing Entitlements” just above “Code Signing Identity”. By default, it’s blank, and it was blank in my other iPhone application project, which I had been successfully beta testing for two months. I simply set that entry to the file name of my entitlements file, “Entitlements.plist,” rebuilt, and it worked!

I’m not sure if this is the generally correct solution, but it seemed to work in this case.

Update, another try

Tried one more idea, though I think making all the bars the same width (and thus only showing percent full) is the right way to do it:

Design Trade-Off: Making hard truths easy to swallow

Here’s a UI design problem to consider. You want to show an overview of a storage system in an iPhone application, of some number of storage servers, each of which has some number of disks.

An initial, somewhat elegant idea is to display each volume in a table view, organized in sections by host name, which changes the cell background for a volume to a bar chart, showing how full that disk is:

Try 1

The obvious issue that crops up here is that disks with different sizes are scaled to fit the entire width, since they’re only showing the percent full. So a 10 TB volume that’s 50% full looks exactly the same as a 500 GB volume that’s 50% full. That’s OK, we’ll just normalize to the size of the largest volume:

Try 2

It’s a little better, since it’s conveying more, and technically more accurate, information in the same space, but to me this just seems hideously jagged and ugly, and ultimately confusing. But which is the best approach? A prettier, simpler design that can seem to distort the truth, or a more accurate, but jumbled and confusing design?