I recently started a new job and was offered the choice of PC or Mac to develop on. In fact, it was between a PC laptop and desktop (both I7 quad cores) or a single MacBook Pro.

Of course I went with the Mac. It has been such a long time since I have had the pleasure of working on a beautiful machine, and what would I need a desktop for anyway? I already have my own PC laptop (Alien M11x), and will have parallels running Windows 7 on the Mac soon as well.

I have been surprised at how many tools I use are available on both platforms.

The tools I miss the most are Tortoise Hg and SVN clients which have no equivalent Finder-integrated equivalents on Mac that I know of. XCode, Garage Band and the MAC OS experience make up for this, along with Cornerstone and SourceTree.

OSX Lion maintains its System 7 roots – including the hidden files annoyance and the cmnd-opt-esc force-quit combo. Terminal and X-Code are really nice additions.

Compared to authoring to Android, publishing to an iOS device from a PC is a pain. It beats spending over 1K for an Mac Mini just for that purpose. And hats off to Adobe for finding a way to make it possible.

Get Flex 4.6 and open the “Hello World” targeting iOS (and BB/Android). Go for a release build, select Captive Air. At prompt for Packaging Settings you will see this:

Flex Release Build

Flex Release Build With iOS Target Fields Empty

In order to move past this point in the release process you will need to complete a number of steps:

Apple Developer Program

Join Apple Developer Program

Buy iOS Developer Subscription

Install iTunes

Get iOS Device ID

Activate your developer membership via email that comes within 24 hours from Apple:

Developer Activation Sequence

Certificate Creation Process

Create a Certificate Signing Request

The certificate process is a bit of a command line mess: OpenSSL is by and for developers.  There are many versions to choose from: do not get the “light” version, and get the one for your version of WIndows – 32 or 64-bit. If you need to install Visual C++ 2008 Redistributables the links are in the same table with the WinSSL binaries. I used Win64 OpenSSL v1.0.0g.

Go to the Provisioning Portal to set up a provision file for each iOS device you plan to test on:

Provisioning Welcome

Download both Provision and Certificate file

input the path to provision file, certificate file and the password you were prompted to create during the certificate conversion process.

Certificate Maintenance

How I keep my certificates organized and secure:

Certificate Directory

1. The CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest is the file you need to generate and upload to the Apple Provisioning Portal
2. I organized the commands from Adobe’s instruction steps in a text cheat sheet. I cut and paste with my specific information in the commands. If I need to create another version I will modify this.
3. The .cer file is the iOS application certificate from the Apple Provisioning Portal
4. The .mobileProvision file is from Apple Provisioning Portal. I didn’t use it for anything.
5. An Android AIR certificate (I keep all certificates for AIR in one directory).
6. davidjmcclelland_portfolio.cer is a bad file I should have deleted.
7. The final .P12 file that Adobe AIR uses for iOS output. Converted to this format from the .pem file of same name by OpenSSL.
8. ios_development.pem was converted from ios_development.cer by OpenSSL.
9. mykey.key is the private key generated by OpenSSL. It corresponds to the public key embedded in CertificateSigningRequest.

Now that I have been all the way through this process I will try to use the same filename as my project for all of the certificate files so that I can keep them together. The Provisioning Portal named the files I downloaded ios_development so I left them alone in case changing the name broke anything.  I keep them all under version control.

What this elaborate process does is ensure that the identity of the creator of any iOS application can be traced like a chain of custody.

Publish to iOS and wait several minutes for an .ipa file to be created.

Drag the ipa file onto iTunes Library section of Left menu and drop it. Then sync to iOS device to get app installed.

Run app. Whew!

Getting a Flash project to compile and run on Android devices is pretty well covered on gotoandlearn.com – I recommend starting there. Some of the instructions are out of date but I was able to make it work.

I spent way too much time getting my Motorola Triumph to come up. If you have one, there is some good reference here. Amazon Fire was also a challenge to connect with, and is stuck on AIR 2.7. This required changing SDK to 4.0 and hacking the AIR Application Descriptor file which had already been generated to call for 3.1.  This aspect of mobile dev is counterproductive once you get over the thrill of testing an app a couple of times. It does underscore the incredible advantage Flex/Flash present for rapid development of mobile apps though, since you can develop a lot before testing on a device or emulator.

My experience targeting the Fire made it clear to me why AIR captive runtime is really not a nice-to-have option:  it is the only way to guarantee your AIR-based app will run on a wide range of phone and tablet form factors. Compare the incremental download time/space savings of AIR to the installation user experience, developer effort and Flash-taint-avoidance. It finally establishes Flex mobile as a legitimate cross-platform approach. No-one knows/cares what tooling I used to develop a free-standing app, and they certainly don’t want to hear that their device won’t run my app because it isn’t certified to run the latest version of AIR. As a developer I can’t afford to guess how many devices I am abandoning when I move from 4.5 to 4.5.1 SDK.

I am circling back to the Adobe multi-platform development approach now that I am using ActionScript 3 and MXML all day. I just don’t have the bandwidth now to be productive in Haxe, HTML5 or other language variants with my new full-time Flex responsibilities.

Meanwhile I hear questions about what alternative to Flex should be pursued, so that keeps the alternative pressure on.

So I am focusing on what is required to build to Desktop, browsers, iOS and Android from Adobe tooling, and incorporating any other required.

So far that meant installing Android SDK and attempting to get a phone to show up for ADB. I have a Motorola Triumph, Droid 3 and Kindle fire to try. So far the Triumph does not show up, but I may have installed the USB storage drivers that came with the phone on dev machine. I have to admit, I have never once gotten a phone to work with ADB.

I downloaded Motorola’s eclipse-based development environment - maybe it has some magic.

iOS will be an interesting challenge as I have to justify buying a dev license and possible set up a Hackintosh to get something on the only iOS device in my house – an iPad2. I finished off the iPod we had trying to fix the cracked screen with a replacement kit.

One note on the Moto Triumph – this is a prepay Android 2.2.2 smartphone through Virgin – I own the phone outright for $300 and can use it on Virgin or Sprint. Virgin is $25/month for “unlimited” data and text plus some voice (which I don’t use anyway) and it is almost as good as the Droid. When you look at total cost of ownership, it is about $1400 less than a less-well equipped iPhone or Droid on Verizon with a similar plan over 2 years – less than half.

Recently, my personal projects have consisted of building “rough drafts” of components slated in my build plan at work. This has enabled me to approach a problem with familiar methods and then translate them into the enterprise method. However, it is something I hope will diminish fairly quickly so I can move on to more productive activities.

Having an active model implementation to compare to and learn from is an invaluable opportunity.  I can start layering on additional enterprise development tools and methods on my personal development environment. I will measure my success at this by how it influences my standing as an enterprise citizen.

Right now I would index enterprise citizenship based on these developer roles:

• naive thrall
• educated consumer
• enlightened contributor/questioner
• process participant/collaborator
• process owner/architect

As I see it, there are three areas these roles vary in what they address: tooling, work practice and integration.

Tooling should be the easiest: the enterprise where I am currently “enthralled” uses mostly FOSS software that I can attempt to replicate on a smaller scale and compare as I go. So far this is proving to be a lot more challenging than I expected.

I am going to hold my scope to individual work practices for now. I will the tools I set up following agile practices as much as possible as an individual dev who is also the customer. This means building tests, programming to interfaces, code coverage etc. That should be a matter of personal discipline and mapping enterprise practice where I work.

Integration is going to be difficult working standalone. I can set up a WSDL service and/or use Google API’s to initiate some automation in my builds. I am also targeting multiple platforms which may benefit from automation too.

The number of parties participating in a highly integrated development environment increases the risk of a momentary critical failure. I have taken some steps to build resilience to this so that I can keep coding through them.

The Clearcase Logo design hints at the concurrency node issue

One step that has been very helpful was to create two local instances of the current project from version control. This serves two purposes: I am able to confirm that work I check in appears in the correct form on other peoples’ instances by doing it myself, and I am able to switch to my “backup” instance when an update breaks my project.

  or 

Another practice is really a side-effect of an unintended consequence of continuous integration. I am very reluctant to check in code unless I am very confident that it won’t break something. This defeats one of the purposes of version control: to provide journalled increments of work.

I have started using a personal version control system as I develop towards a working milestone that I can check in to the main development stream. Fortunately, I have a development sandbox I can work in that is independent of the main development stream so this work can build against a stable, simplified environment that is always “up”. Still feels dysfunctional though.

I had never heard of this IDE until very recently. I assumed Enterprise meant you installed the Flash Builder plugin in your existing Eclipse instead of getting Flash Builder standalone.

Everyone calls Idea IntelliJ because, let’s face it- they probably think they made a clever play on “IDE” but no-one knows what you’re talking about if you refer to it by the product name. “What version of Idea are you using?”

So why use IntelliJ instead of Builder, FDT, FlashDevelop or Eclipse? The short answer is that it kicks Eclipse’s butt in performance, usability and actual capability. Builder’s too, If you aren’t concerned about editing MXML layouts visually and Adobe product integration. It is a very nice, well-thought-out tool that has all the hooks needed to fit into almost any enterprise setting that uses typical Java/OSS middleware and almost any version control system.

If you want to try before you buy you can download a trial of the Ultimate Edition. The free Community Edition does not have the MXML/Actionscript plug-in. I might post more on this as I learn more about it.

Here’s a cool feature I found recently: IntelliJ can make panels semi-opaque when they lose focus so you can still monitor them while coding: