@ Design Time

Over the last few days I’ve been getting alerts on my iPhone that my provisioning profiles are about to expire.  Being new to the iPhone development process, I missed the fact that Development Provisioning Profiles expire after four months.  After updating my profiles I was surprised to see that I kept getting warnings. It seemed now that I had both the new and expiring profiles being synched each time I connected my iPhone to iTunes.

Once the older Development Provisioning Profiles expired my applications stopped working.  I found the below steps worked to correct the issue:

1. Delete the applications from your iPhone
2. Remove the Development Provisioning Profiles that are expiring from your iPhone.  This can be found under Settings –> General –> Profiles.
3. Remove your applications from iTunes
4. Remove old Provisioning Profiles under ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisiong Profiles ( Finder window shown below )
5. Generate new Provisioning Profiles through Apple’s iPhone Developer Program Portal
6. Install your new Provisioning Profiles into XCode.  The “How To” tab under the Provisioning link in the iPhone Developer Program Portal provides a step by step tutorial on how to do this.
7. Re-build your application and follow the your standard process for publishing your application to your device.

I like seemingly everyone in Corporate America has a BlackBerry.  It is a great device for email, but using it for anything else can be painful.  A recent example of this would be every time I Sync my calendar, I would get a helpful runtime error that force closes BlackBerry Desktop Manager.  The runtime error offered no hint that the underlying issue was corruption in the device’s calendar database.

This can be easily fixed using the below steps:

1. Open BlackBerry Desktop Manager
2. Open the Synchronize menu
3. Once in the Synchronize menu uncheck the Synchronize automatically option
4. Go back to the Main Menu
5. Connect your device
6. Once your device is connected click on the Backup and Restore menu
7. Then select the Advance Option
8. Upon clicking on the Advanced option all of your device’s databases will be loaded
9. Select your calendar databases as shown below.
10. Then press the Clear button.  You will be prompted if you want to clear the databases from your device.  Press Yes. This will reset your Calendar Databases on your device.  The calendar you are synchronizing will not be impacted.
11. After you’ve cleared your device’s Calendar databases you should now be able to synchronize without issue.

Remember the old saying “it is just as important how you say something is as important as what was said”?

This truth also applies to application development.  Just one quick glance at your desktop to see the different fonts used in the icons alone. 

Microsoft’s office suite and even Photoshop are good examples of the branding power fonts can provide.

Like any other design element fonts provides you application with a voice helping your application stand out from the countless others on the web or in the App Store.

A few helpful Font Links:

• dafont.com
• 1001 Free Fonts
• fonts.com
• urbanfonts

* Be advised fonts like graphics and sound have their own license agreements.