I almost f#cked up a project

Don’t worry, it all ended perfectly fine.

But it is something worthwhile keeping in mind while you are developing software for others.

Backstory.

I’m an animator and I deliver a massive amount of content to all kind of people. The other day I had to deliver 500 different animations; to 500 different people.

So I used Glide to make this interface; people would access a page with their own unique code (no need for login) and get the file dedicated to them (email them the files wasn’t possible for multiple reasons).

It was build and I tested it a couple of times on different systems. Except on Iphone.

The mistakes:

  • I made a button which said “Download” - but in reality it was just a link towards the file. That is a bad call on my side; but I tought it would work out fine because on every system I tried; I was able to download.
  • Apparently when you open a link on Iphone; a direct link towards a video file. You cannot save it from safari! Which is completely mindboggling to me. Every Iphone user I ask to download a specific file; can’t do it.

Next steps:

  • Considering buying an Iphone to test this stuff as well. Already got android, apple and a pc.
  • Find a better way to make sure users can download files from Glide to their device.

Feature Request (will make seperate post)
Can we have a download action? That downloads the file instead of opening it?

Please note that if this means people inputting a code to see their stuff, and not role/row owners, it isn’t good practice and can get you into trouble.

Can confirm this has been a Safari/iOS problems for years and they never fix it.

Yeah, the roleowner is something that I was already doing! Thx

And thank you for confirming that iOS has that problem. Realllly annoying.

1 Like

iOS/Safari heavily leans towards displaying the file first before allow downloading, due to security reasons. I’m not sure if Glide can do something about that to be honest.

I tried using HTML (with a and download tag), but I recall it didn’t go anywhere.