Is Apple Flat Design a reference by default?

We were joking with my friend JC and arguing with Anthony N. about iOS7 new design. Such design were being tagged as “polarizing”. I have to admit that we can say so!

Debate on flat design hash come in town now and will probably be kept open for a while. People will goes with who were right or not right about taking this direction before Apple.

Flat design well initiated by Microsoft have now been kinda legitimated by Apple. I have event heard recently that a genius designer were already on this FD move for 6 months and thus in advance on he’s time! Meaning in advance of people/Apple Time. Indeed, for our great pleasure Apple is still ruling digital mobile world despite of it’s minority market share vs Samsung/Androïd. Then still nowadays, any new Apple design is automatically becoming a reference.

Biggest question is “would Apple Flat Design become THE reference whatever the chosen design?”

Discover an app that is a good start for Python beginners

I was looking at the App Store for quick Python learning apps or some kind of python quick hints apps. I felt down on Pythonista and realised later that the developer was the same as the one who made NewsRack (my first and favorite RSS reader app).

If you are the kind of mac user that use command line tools in Terminal and work behind an Office NTLM proxy, it’s almost sure that from times to times you unplug your ethernet adaptor to get connected to Wifi just for being able to do “git clone something” or “brew install somestuff”! Isn’t it?

If you are this guy (girls included), I have a solution for you: cntlm.

Every years, iOS developers have the opportunity to clean it’s udid entries from iOS Provisionning Portal. Everytime you have to do this, it’s always good to keep a track of what was currently setup before to clean it all. At least to have in mind who you might ask if their devices are still valid or if they have upgraded to the latest iPhone (meaning the old UDID does not need now to be filling the 100 limit for registred devices).

For some times, I had a quick and dirty command line that used to just extract the UDID list without associated holder name. Now I have writen a litle python script that could extract the UDID list but also the associated label name.

I have recently configured on my mac Microsoft Communicator to communicate at work with my Windows desktop colleagues. This is working like a charm and very well linked with Microsoft Outlook for presence and so on. Even video conference and screen sharing work very well for a Microsoft product.

The only thing that was really painfull was that everytime I disconnect my Mac from LAN and come back again, Communicator just stays in it’s “error” mode and I never think of manually reconnect. So, I finaly end up being always “off” until I need to contact someone and only then I realise that “damned, I’m currently disconnected again”!

So I have setup an automatic re-connexion system every time network status does change!

Note: this article have been updated on March 24th 2015 with IE browser check.

Sometimes, you just need to have a different pages based on User Agent. Not anymore to have a specific design for different browsers as it was 15 years back, but just because the all content might be different depending on if you are on Android, iPhone or on Windows 8 for instance.

I had to do that once while developping some web pages on PHP. At this time I was using a PHP classe that is given free for personal use (get it here).

While writing this post I have discovered plenty of solutions for mobile device detection. Most of them are listed here.

Last time I needed again to have different content based on device type I decided to use .htaccess directives. This is extremely fast and I believe it’s a cleaner approach. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to share it here.

It’s truly very elegant, but keep in mind that defining .htaccess RewriteRules with regex can be very tricky and almost always hide a little regression! You have been warned.

When trying to upload/submit an App to the AppStore, did you ever had an error saying that ”This app contains an embedded provisioning profile that is not associated with your account”? And then asking you to ”Please use a provisioning profile associated with Team ID”?

After having found that octopress was a nice easy blogging system, I was almost sure that I would write tones of articles every weeks. I end up writing just a couple of them in few months!

Looking at what’s on Google I found some nice blogs with useful snippets or scripts. But for some reasons, it did not really fit my needs, which was to be able to create, test and publish an article from BBEdit without going into Terminal and do some command line (that I never remember).

So I decided to find a way to make it by myself and wrote some AppleScripts runnable from BBEdit. Let’s see if I will get more articles done that way…

If you are badly trying to host on Apache an Android app .apk file without success, you might want to check the following few things:

1) Check your /etc/mime.types

Ensure you have set a proper mime type like bellow:

    application/vnd.android.package-archive         apk

2) Check that your device does allow download from untrusted stores

3) Do not set .htaccess Auth for particular .apk file types

If you were trying to prevent anybody to be able to download your apk and have set an .htaccess Auth, then that’s your issue…

If you want to retreive just one iOS app icon with glossy effect, it’s quite easy. You can drag and drop it from iTunes application (see a previous post). You’ll even have the transparent rounded corner.

But if you want it programaticaly so that you can run an automated system and have it on the fly for a web site (example: my couple years ago test of iWebkit framework) there is a trick for it. I haven’t really found any documentation on this anywhere. So here are my findings.