Portable Apps for Development

I am a fan of the portableapps system and have been for several years.  I have begun to mess around with web development, adobe air, and android development. I have several portable apps that I use for this.

1) Eclipse Portable - Java, Adobe Air, HTML IDE. Not the latest version but certainly adequate for some of the development I am doing.

2) Mozilla Firefox Portable - This is the browser that I use to preview HTML coding.

3) Inkscape Portable - Open source SVG graphics editor. Useful for logos.

4) IcoFX Portable - an icon creation/editing tool.

5) ColorPic - Get the color codes for any pixel on your screen.

6) FotoGrafix Portable - an image editor. Useful for combing images, resizing images, and touchups.

I find these apps quite helpful in my daily development work.

Dead Nexus 7 - No! Just Sleeping

I really love my new Nexus tablet. The speed and beauty is wonderful. You can imagine my dismay when I went to turn it on for the first time in the day and nothing happened. I worked the power button over and no response. I plugged in the charger. Nothing. I plugged it into a USB port, nothing. I was really beginning to panic. So i googled dead Nexus 7 and I was not the only one to have this experience. The solution was to hold the power button down for a long time. Anywhere from 15 to 40 secs. And to my delight, the tablet came back to life after about 20 secs. It hasn't happened again, and hopefully it won't. What a relief to get it going again and to avoid the hassle of a return.

Thoughts on the Google Nexus 7

I received my Nexus 7 a couple of days ago. My initial impressions are good. I am comparing this unit to my wife's Ipad2 and a cheap android (4.1) tablet I already had. First of all, I wished I had never purchased the cheap android tablet. For the most part it is very frustrating to use, due to the minimal processing power it has. That's the first thing I noticed about the Nexus & - it zings! Things happen the instant a button is touched. Apps load quickly. It's a beautiful thing. The next problem with the cheap tablet is the dismal battery life. I can only get 1-11/2 hrs out it. After an hour on the Nexus I still have 95% charge. Sweet. The cheap tablet did do some things well - like playing videos. But don't ask it to multitask - it fails miserably. The Nexus 7 screen looks great. It compares favoribly with the Ipad2 I think. The responsiveness is good.

On the down side, the Nexus, like the Ipad2, doesn't have an external memory card slot. Of course you can interact with the computer by usb cable and bluetooth, but why not add the card slot? Even the cheap tablet had a miniSD card slot.

I bought the 16g version of the Nexus 7, directly from Google. I received the unit in 3 days. It is package nicely, but it took me awhile to slip off the out covering of the box - it was on pretty tight.

For the money, I think the Google Nexus 7 is an excellent product for the price.

Also, the app I developed with Eclipse and Phonegap (Cordova) looks awesome on the Nexus 7.

Using PhoneGap (Cordova) in Eclipse

After I discovered that I could not deploy Adobe AIR to Android when using HTML/Java as source, I looked for another way. I found PhoneGap. Officially, PhoneGap is now Apache Cordova. It is a mobile development framework that allows using HTML and Javascript to create phone apps. I loaded PhoneGap and with Eclipse and I was able to use the HTML/Javascript files I had developed previously. I downloaded the app to my tablet and it worked. It was quite a tedious task to set up the project to work with phonegap. I knew I wasn't the first to notice this - so I searched for  phonegap plugin and found one that does all the setup for you here. Now I can easily create a phonegap project in Eclipse. I can write my code in HTML and Javascript. What a wonderful world.

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Building and deploying AIR apps in Eclipse using HTML and Javascript

Here is the setup I use for developing, building, and deploying Adobe air apps in Eclipse. I have the following installed on a USB drive:

1) Eclipse portable: Eclipse SDK Version: 3.7.2
2) Adobe AIR SDK

I create my project as a General project. Here is the structure I use:

ProjectName

    image File Folder
    cSS File Folder
    inc File Folder - javascripts

    ProjectName.html (pseudo Index.html)

    ProjectName-app.xml 

    page1.html
    page2.html

The must follow items are in red. The other items can really be named whatever you like. To use my external run configurations the project structure has to have the items in red above. The advantage to following this structure is I do not have to create a new external run config for each new project. Here's a "Hello World" project structure to illustrate the above.

 When I am ready to test the app in AIR I use the following external run configuration:

Before running this configuration, you must select the ProjectName-app.xml file.

When I want to generate a certificate I use the following run configuration:

The certificate file cert.p12 will be in the base workspace directory.

To build the project as an AIR app for windows, I use the following run configuration:

Once again, before running this configuration, you must select the ProjectName-app.xml file.

When using these external run configurations, the most frequent error is caused by not selecting the  ProjectName-app.xml file first.

Eclipse, Adobe AIR, and Android Trials and Tribulations

I have spent the last week or so playing around with Eclipse, Adobe AIR, jQuery, javascript, html and so on in hopes of building an android app using HTML and javascript in AIR. Today, I decided I would package my AIR app for Android. Today I found out you can not package a html based AIR project for Android. The app works fine for windows - but you can't package a html based AIR project for Android.

Well - this is a setback. I've been configuring my system, creating apps in html and javascript in hopes of porting to Android. OK. It ain't gonna happen.

So what's next? Phonegap. I'm looking into Phonegap. We'll see how that goes.