All posts tagged entitlements

Compress ( aka Zip ) Problems in Mac OSX Leopard

By on May 18, 2010 in iPad, iPhone, iPhone SDK, Mac, programming, Tutorials & Explanations with No Comments

Here’s a curious issue!

I was having issues with entitlement / code signing on an iPhone app.  I was positive everything was correct, yet the beta tester I was emailing it to could not install it.  I was ripping my hair out.  (And boy, did I look funny!)

I’ll cut to the chase.   The beta tester’s iTunes kept reporting that his entitlements are not valid.  In plain english: his device did not have permission to install the app.  If you checked out my previous blog about short cuts to checking entitlements, you’ll forsee where I eventually ended up.  We went to check the code signing and entitlement files/folders within the .app package, and low and behold they were gone!!   Hmmm.

Well, to again compress the story and jump to the end, it turned out that the file he had was NOT the same file I had sent!   When right-clicking on the sample.app file and selecting “Compress”, we ended up with a SAMPLE.ZIP file that, when unzipped, had files missing!

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Troubleshooting Tips For “entitlements are not valid”

By on May 17, 2010 in iPhone, iPhone SDK, programming, Tutorials & Explanations with No Comments

“The application [app name] was not installed on the iPhone because the entitlements are not valid.”

Damn, I HATE it when that happens!

There are several things that can cause this, but I’ve learned how to cut to the chase and quickly and easily verify if the source .app you’re trying to install is at least even built properly in the first place, and a few of the common mistakes that cause 90% of the problems.

First a short piece of background for the newbie Windows->Mac switchers out there:  Mac OSX applications are shown as .app files.  This is the equivalent of Windows .EXE files.  These, however, are not really files, like they are in Windows.  They’re really just specialized folders that Mac OSX recognizes and treats as an “application”, presenting an app icon and executing the code embedded within it when launched.  It’s sort of like the grapevine in the movie Johnny Dangerously.  Double click on it and the OS says “Oh, I know this grapevine… let’s really launch the application inside of it instead.”   ;-)

In fact, if you email an .app such as  SAMPLE.APP to a Windows user and they save it out to their Desktop, they will see a folder called SAMPLE whereas on the Mac you’d just see a program icon called SAMPLE.APP.

When you RIGHT click (or CTRL-CLICK if you haven’t enabled right-click on your mouse) on an .app icon you’ll get an option called “Show Package Contents”.  Select that and you get a Finder window that pops up and shows the contents of the app (basically, just as if you opened the folder and saw all the contents therein, identical to what you’d see in Windows).

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