Example of Hardware Investment: Surface Pro 2017

[zwetan]

So on the latest Black Friday / Cyber Monday, I decided to invest into yet another hardware device

the Surface Pro 2017

Here the logic of why spend that kind of money on hardware.

Basically, when you publish with Adobe AIR on mobile you mainly target iOS and Android,
and you manage your app to be able to adapt to multiple screen resolutions (phone and tablet).

Investing time and effort to port an iOS/Android app to Windows RT / Windows Phone
has always been a "no no" for me, simply because Adobe AIR does not publish to those platforms,
and few years later those platforms are dead in the water anyway.

But ... if you go look in the Windows Store for Windows 10, you will see a pattern, almost every big game published for iOS/Android are also published to the Universal Windows Platform.

For example: Cut The Rope

And here the "trick", if you look into Available for:
you will see PC, and sometimes more rarely PC and Mobile.

To me it means "hey I could also publish Adobe AIR apps/games to the UWP, even if I only target PC",
without having to rebuild the whole app from scratch and/or with another technology stack.

Now, why not using a VM ?

I can have a Windows 10 VM running and test there but there are 2 things I can hardly test:

• touch
• XBOX controller

If you look into Steam, you can see a tag Touch-Friendly and a curator Touch-friendly-games, and those do not seem to be too overcrowded.

Also, with Adobe AIR

• I can support Touch event handling
• support the Xbox controller with the GameInput API
• and use Desktop Bridge to publish to UWP

Now, why go with a Surface Pro ?

First, the smallest config Intel Core m3 / 128 GB SSD / 4 GB RAM got a lot of discount, it seems Microsoft is pushing hard to sell more of them during the holidays.

Right now, on amazon, you can find the bundle
Microsoft Surface Pro (Intel Core m3 / 128 GB SSD / 4 GB RAM) + Type Cover keyboard for 799€
on Microsoft store you can find the same bundle for 799€ too
and I got mine for 700€ (yep saved 430€) which was a pretty good deal imho.

The Surface Pro cover the two basics for testing: touch screen and being able to connect an Xbox controller.

The screen is 12,3 inches, that means 2736 x 1824 (267 PPP) with a 3:2 ratio which is also quite interesting to test for multiple screens.

Also, this latest Surface Pro can also be used to test other nifty hardware stuff

• The Surface Pen
• The Surface Dial

Morality, a lot of bang for the buck and hardware stuff I can not test in other environments.

Oh, but it get better ...

My whole logic here is to be able to test on real hardware to be sure it works as intended for the users and also be able to support those users, eg. "make the users happy, sell more apps".

But this low-end Surface Pro pack a lot of oomph and it happen you can also definitively use it as a laptop to do work stuff like programming and designing

Mind me, I'm usually an Apple hardware guy and I look down on Windows ...
but here Microsoft bring a pretty interesting combo of hardware and software at a cheap price.

Question: Can you do programming stuff on this cheap Intel Core m3-7Y30 ?
Answer: yes!

First thing you would want to do is upgrade your Windows 10 to the latest
see Windows 10 version history

Mine came with version 1703 (Redstone 2) which is nice and all, but you do want to upgrade
to the "Fall Creators Update", eg. version 1709 (Redstone 3)

Why?

Because from version 1709, the Windows Subsystem for Linux is no more in beta and can be installed directly from the Windows Store

It is not exactly like using Cygwin but it's nice and integrated into the system and more importantly it uses very few memory compared to running a full blown Ubuntu VM.

Be sure to read the WSL FAQ.

Little tests I did is open many Ubuntu bash console, compile stuff (like redtamarin), using tons of SSH sessions to different servers, checkout stuff from github and other svn repos, etc.

Surprisingly even with a m3 CPU and only 4GB of RAM, the little machine eat through all those tasks without too much efforts .

So I went to my next test and see if it could run and compile with Flash builder.

First, I installed the Java SE 8u152 JDK, and right after that I installed Adobe Flash Builder 4.7 and Adobe Scout CC, and it does work and it's not slow at all (yep Eclipse run fast with only 4GB RAM).

Little tip:
By default on the Surface Pro you will get High DPI scaling that will make the Flash Builder 4x times smaller.
To change that select the FlashBuilder.exe , right click properties
and in the Compatibility tab
select the option Override high DPI scaling behaviour. Scaling performed by:
and then select System (Enhanced)

and with that you'll get back a normal UI ratio.

From there I tested stuff also with VS Code etc.
Did not tested big graphics softwares like Photoshop but I do think they should run fine too

Morality: I went and buy the cheapest of the surface pro for testing purpose
and damn!!! I can actually work on this little machine

So far it got all the advantages of an iPad pro + Macbook Air combo, at 1/4 of the price, nice.

[0xc3]

I agree I think Microsoft is killing it with the Surface line.

Have you published to the MS Store using Desktop Bridge? I converted an app with desktop bridge and side loaded on my machine to test. Everything worked just fine, but I never put it on the store because it was not a high priority to the company.

My desktop guys are about 60% Windows 7, but shrinking. I would like to use store at some point. I was wondering if anybody has full publishing experience and if there are any pains.

[zwetan]

I have not published anything public, I have mainly tested under a Windows 10 VM,
but hence why I'm adding hardware now to push the testing further.

I kind of half-mentioned long time ago a "hello world" project based on templates
to help publish redtamarin exe, as .deb package, .pkg on macOs, as daemon, etc.

And I extended the concept to cover any possible publishing with Adobe AIR,
for example with Windows if you want to publish a desktop app for Windows 7
you will have to buy a cert to sign the app, and for Windows 10 you will need to
create a Microsoft Developer account and pay few dollars/euros and then you will use
the UWP to publish the app and there it will sign your app, etc.

In short, I create template and I document them, because first I need it,
and second I thought it was a good idea to show out there how/what you can publish
with Redtamarin, and third I thought "hey that would be useful too for AIR".

That's the main weakness of Adobe AIR: the publishing.

I'm even thinking of an AIR app to manage all that like a AIR SDK Helper,
eg. select CLI/GUI, select which OS to publish to, select one or many of the
different mode of publishing, etc.

Also connected to the post What does it mean to support a platform?,
the macOS version you target can influence which AIR SDK version you can use,
and depending if you want to publish a .dmg or on the Mac App Store it can limit
what the AIR app can do (eg. no HTMLLoader on Mac App Store because WebKit.dylib is verbotten)
and so change your publishing strategy.

Simply put, there is not a single central place of reference documentation for these kind of things.

[0xc3]

The entire progress of using desktop bridge was surprisingly easy to make the appx package, and side loading is just power shell install cert, install appx, done. and the app ran perfectly. So the technology of it works great. I was just wondering about the approval process, if anybody had or is pushing through he store and if there were any headaches.
Guess I'll find out when I do it