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Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

jackg.org

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Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#5

> Provisioning and distribution is a nightmare I fully agree. I threw myself in at the deep end - never spent any length of time on Mac OS and only working from tutorials for Xcode, it was atrocious trying to figure it out!

And since it's a closed ecosystem, there's no way for a startup to come along and make the process easier. It all lies on Apple.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#6
post #3

"there must be an iOS equivalent of the tag, right? Apparently not." Just use three labels, with the middle label set to bold.

Doesn't that make you "too" responsible for the spacing? Is it as easy to get the distance between two labels to be exactly one space? Or can you include trailing/leading spaces in the strings, and have them automatically laid out?

Note: I (obviously) don't program for iOS, but the above recommendation would be non-trivial in the toolkit I know best (GTK+) which is why I'm curious.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#8

> Provisioning and distribution is a nightmare I fully agree. I threw myself in at the deep end - never spent any length of time on Mac OS and only working from tutorials for Xcode, it was atrocious trying to figure it out!

Admittedly the first time I wanted to run an app on my device it took a while to figure everything out but this was back in 2009. Since then it's become an awful lot easier to provision and distribute. It's still much more difficult that it should be (Android and Windows 8 are much easier) but once you get the hang of it it's the same process every time.

Re: Surprises When Designing An iPhone App

#9

> Provisioning and distribution is a nightmare I fully agree. I threw myself in at the deep end - never spent any length of time on Mac OS and only working from tutorials for Xcode, it was atrocious trying to figure it out!

It's deliberately hard, because developers are trying to implement a use case which Apple has tried to prevent.

The are four different options:

a) Developer builds which have to be installed using Xcode for each phone. That won't work for anyone able to install.

b) Ad-Hoc builds, which must be specified for each phone. Again that doesn't scale.

c) Enterprise builds, which install on a unlimited number of phones. This is fine, but everyone who installs them must work for the same company, and this is contractually required by Apple.

d) App Store builds, which obviously must be submitted to the AppStore.

What developers want is the ability to do an AdHoc build to anyone. This is restricted for the precise reason that it would allow someone (not Apple) to create a rival store.

Having said that, the error messages you receive could be a lot clearer when you mess the signing process up.

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