Getting started with iOS iPhone apps and Flash CS6

One of the reasons there's been little activity (hardware development-wise) at Nerd Towers is we've finally joined the cool kids and had a go at making some iPhone/iPad apps. Yes, yes, not before time and all that. But it's been quite a learning curve!

Not the coding - we've been writing stuff in Flash/Actionscript for a while now. But it was time to upgrade from that old work-purchased CS3 so we went crazy and subscribed to Adobe Flash CS6 for 12 months. At just £17/month it's actually really good value - it'd take about three years to pay back the £600 purchase price at this rate, by which time, there'll probably be an update on the way! Using the monthly subscription method, you automatically get any updates as they are released. Well done, Adobe!

Anyway, back to this blog post - making our first iPhone app.
Actually, if you're using a Windows version of CS6, getting it up and running is actually a bit of a faff, but perfectly do-able. All the tutorials on the 'web tell you to use a Mac if you can (I can't bring myself to, and other people I know have battled on down the Windows route successfully so I thought I'd give it a go!)

There's no point repeating here what the Adobe website tells you to do, perfectly well, at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/iphone/WS144092a96ffef7cc-371badff126abc17b1f-7ffe.html but the upshot is that after about an hour of messing about (including going to the shops for milk and coffee) we got a working .p12 certificate. And more importantly, this little screen:

We successfully created our first iPhone app (well, I did anyway!).
Now we're off to bug Steve about how to actually get it onto the device....

Basic4Android

One thing we've been keen on over the last 12 months or more, is making our own USB devices. These can be anything - we've made miniature instruments and servo controllers amongst other things, but the idea that you can create a device, plug it into a PC and it just works has been really exciting.

Out in the real world - not Nerdland - the rest of the world is busy getting on with mobile phones and tablets and cool things like that. And leaving us PC lovers behind as we look so archaic, sitting hunched over a notebook/laptop in the local coffee shop. The cool kids are too busy swooshing and swishing on their touch screens to worry too much about a few motors chained to piece of rapidly-becoming-obsolete piece of technology!

So we've had a bit of a change of heart here at Nerd Towers recently.
Rather than trying to continue denying mobiles and mobile computing, we're slowly learning to love it. By which, of course we mean, slowly learning to love Android (installing iTunes on a PC is akin to pouring cold tea down the back of the air vents, shudder, Apple, shudder). But developing for Android means getting messy with Java.

Unless you're already quite proficient with Actionscript (AS3) - then haXe is probably a great place to start. But haXe libraries are pretty limiting. We've not found anything that, for example, allows you to communicate with the USB port. So once again we set off looking for a development suite that would compile for Android, and give us access to the USB stack.

Step forward Basic4Android.

Not only is this a brilliant IDE, offering VB-style syntax and a familiar looking environment (you even hit F5 to compile and run your code for goodness sake!) it also compiles to native Android code - so no pesky AIR runtimes and making your apps incompatible with a large share of the market (AIR only runs on devices with ARM7 or better processors - most mid-range phones are still shipping with ARM6 in them).

And the best thing? USB support!
So far, we've only got a simple "hello world" app working, but it's a start.
But already Basic4Android is looking to be quite a powerful bit of kit that could really kit-start some interesting ideas (a bit like Oshonsoft Basic did for our PIC microcontrollers). It's so great, in fact, that the author is offering a special deal for all of us:

If you like the Basic4Android software, you can buy it from http://www.basic4ppc.com/

Put in the voucher code - coxvau - and you'll get a massive 50% off!

And we'll get a year's worth of free support and upgrades. So everyone benefits! But no-one more than you - when you've compiled and released your first app, who knows where it could lead.......