Author Archives: Michael Portuesi

Michael Portuesi

Michael Portuesi is a software developer with 20 years professional experience in web and digital media development, using programming languages including C, C++, Perl, Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ActionScript and Ruby.

Michael has worked for companies as large as 120,000 and as small as 4 employees, and developed websites for top corporate clients. He currently builds websites for children at Zoodles, a small startup in Palo Alto, CA, using Adobe Flex and Ruby on Rails.

When not clacking away at the keyboard, Michael enjoys amateur astronomy, road cycling, video games, and pen collecting. He lives in San Francisco.

Shipping your Android application: a checklist

By Michael Portuesi | Published: August 21, 2010
I recently completed my first Android application. I learned a lot from the project, which was a ton of fun. Out of that project popped a checklist of things to do in order to make sure your application is “industrial strength” before it heads out into the Android Market. This isn’t a complete list, but [...]
Posted in Android | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Opening links in AIR’s HTML loader

By Michael Portuesi | Published: March 2, 2010
The AIR HTMLLoader class and its control wrapper, the <mx:HTML> component, are a pretty straightforward way to display web content within an AIR application. While the combination of HTMLLoader and ActionScript is pretty powerful, HTMLLoader and <mx:HTML> do pose some limitations if you are trying to develop a serious web application in AIR. But one [...]
Posted in AIR | 3 Comments

Functional testing AIR applications with FlexMonkey, Part 4

By Michael Portuesi | Published: February 21, 2010
In the first three parts of this series, we built our AIR application for use with FlexMonkey and authored tests. In this part, we examine how to get your FlexMonkey AIR test suite running as part of your continuous build. Part 4 (this article) will integrate the application into your build using Ant. Part 5 [...]
Posted in AIR, Test driven | 6 Comments

Adobe Flex and AIR error codes

By Michael Portuesi | Published: February 17, 2010
This post is an attempt to gather in one place links to all of the official Adobe pages containing error codes for ActionScript, Flash, Flex and AIR. Flex 3 Runtime Errors Flex Error Codes Wiki ActionScript Compiler Error Codes AIR Developer Tool (ADT) error codes AIR ApplicationUpdater error codes (scroll down to the downloadError event) [...]
Posted in AIR, Flex | Leave a comment

Launching AIR apps from the command line on the Macintosh

By Michael Portuesi | Published: February 9, 2010
The process for launching an AIR application from the command line seems straightforward enough – Oliver Goldman from Adobe has a blog entry describing how it is done. Of course, it would be great if things worked as described, but they don’t. If you follow his instructions, and you are on the Mac, you’ll get [...]
Posted in AIR, Rants | 3 Comments

RSpec: Stubbing RAILS_ENV and other constants

By Michael Portuesi | Published: February 9, 2010
RSpec is a great tool not only for writing tests in Ruby, but helping you articulate the requirements for your project in a clean and executable fashion. Every now and then, the need arises to stub the value of a Ruby constant in your RSpec examples. The most obvious use case is to test functionality [...]
Posted in Ruby, Test driven | 3 Comments

Renewing AIR certificates

By Michael Portuesi | Published: January 11, 2010
I’ve spent some time understanding the AIR certificates used to sign your application for distribution. The AIR documentation goes to great pains to outline the situations when you need to update your application’s certificate: In some circumstances, you may need to change the certificate you use to sign your AIR application. Such circumstances include: Upgrading [...]
Posted in AIR | Leave a comment

More Flash, Flex and Ruby E-Zines

By Michael Portuesi | Published: December 30, 2009
In search of ever more content to clog up my Kindle, I’ve come across the following two e-zines worth checking out.  Both are free downloads in PDF format. The Rubyist feels a little bit like the Pragmatic Programmer e-zine, but focused entirely on the world of Ruby. It has the same kind of smorgasboard of [...]
Posted in Flex, Recommendations, Ruby | Leave a comment

Functional testing AIR applications with FlexMonkey, Part 3

By Michael Portuesi | Published: December 30, 2009
In previous posts in this series, we looked at the best overall approach for AIR applications with FlexMonkey, as well as building your AIR application and getting it to run with the FlexMonkey Console. In this part, we present tips and tricks for authoring tests with the FlexMonkey Console.  Although you can put together some [...]
Posted in AIR, Flex, Test driven | 5 Comments

Functional testing AIR applications with FlexMonkey, Part 2

By Michael Portuesi | Published: December 22, 2009
In Part 1 of this series, we examined the best overall approach for testing your AIR application with FlexMonkey. In this article, we take a look at building an instrumented version of your AIR application and getting it working with the FlexMonkey IDE Console. A note about versions I originally did this work using FlexMonkey [...]
Posted in AIR, Flex, Test driven | 15 Comments