Balsamiq

Better Adobe AIR Beta 2 Package for Ubuntu 64-bit Jaunty

UPDATE:  Package for AIR 2.5.0.  Remember you still need to follow the instructions below and your mileage may vary !!!

adobeair_2.5.0.16600balsamiq1.deb

We ran into a number of issues with installing Adobe AIR Beta 2 on our hosting infrastructure for myBalsamiq.com last week, so I wanted to share a trick I found that made the process a lot smoother and that hopefully is not too big of a hack while we wait for real 64-bit debian packages from Adobe.

So first of all a note of warning, the debian package that you can download here does not constitute a way to install a 64-bit package for Adobe AIR!  Adobe has announced an official 64-bit distribution but at least as concerns beta 2, we are still talking about using workarounds to get a 32-bit AIR to run on a 64-bit distribution through downloading and installing the appropriate 32-bit dependencies.

Our use case for installing Adobe AIR on some of our servers is a simple feature that was missing from previous myBalsamiq beta releases.  What happens is that when you upload a BMML file to a myBalsamiq project we call Balsamiq Mockups Desktop through the command line interface and produce a PNG of the uploaded mockup using the export command.  This allows us to create a new myBalsamiq Mockup page for the upload complete with a mockup image without having to launch the Mockups editor first.

Now Adobe has a very detailed procedure that is important to get acquainted with to install Adobe AIR 2 on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 because you still have to go through it, at least up to the step where it asks you to run AdobeAirInstaller.bin (which didn't work for us at all). Actually, I found there was no need to extract libs from the two debs (steps 4 & 5) as everything was setup right by the ia32_libs package.  I also did have to run an extra getlibs to grab libxstl1.1 as follows

sudo getlibs -l libxslt.so.1

Now  once the official deb package installed, because of a current bug in apt referenced here on Launchpad and here on the debian bug tracker, installing an AIR app through the AIR App Installer would work, but would create a broken package for the app rendering apt unusable for further installations.

So...  now for the big hack which allowed us to both install Adobe AIR using a deb package and not break apt.  What I did was use the following steps to extract, amend, and repackage the official Adobe AIR deb package to produce a patched version that lies to apt by saying its a 64-bit package!

First I extracted the deb package contents and debian meta-data into a folder:

dpkg-deb -x adobeair-2.0.0.11670.deb adobeair-2.0.0.11670balsamiq1
dpkg-deb -e adobeair-2.0.0.11670.deb adobeair-2.0.0.11670balsamiq1/DEBIAN

Then I updated the DEBIAN/control file switching the i386 architecture to amd64 and the version to 2.0.0.11670balsamiq1.

I then rebuilt the package using:

dpkg -b adobeair-2.0.0.11670balsamiq1

which produced the adobeair-2.0.0.11670balsamiq1.deb package which you can download here.

Here's a trace of installing it on one of our machines where you can see that aptitude picks up the presence of the adobe air package (which won't work if you use the official one)

luis@mockupshq:~$ sudo dpkg -i adobeair-2.0.0.11670balsamiq1.deb
Selecting previously deselected package adobeair.
(Reading database ... 63964 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking adobeair (from adobeair-2.0.0.11670balsamiq1.deb) ...

Running 32-bit AIR on 64-bit systems has not been fully tested. However, 32-bit AIR is expected to run on 64-bit systems if they have the required 32-bit libraries and packages installed.
 The following links describe how to install or update AIR 2.0 on 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 11 and OpenSuse 11.1.
 Installing Adobe AIR 2.0 on 64-bit Linux visit http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/521/cpsid_52132.html
 Updating to Adobe AIR 2.0 on 64-bit Linux visit http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/521/cpsid_52132.html
Setting up adobeair (2.0.0.11670balsamiq1) ...

luis@mockupshq:~$ aptitude show adobeair
Package: adobeair
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 2.0.0.11670balsamiq1
Priority: extra
Section: Development
Maintainer: Adobe Systems, Incorporated
Uncompressed Size: 44.9M
Depends: libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.4), libxslt1.1, libxml2
PreDepends: lzma
Conflicts: adobeair1.0
Description: Adobe AIR

Now remember, your mileage with our deb is not guaranteed (although I actually also use this package on my laptop which is running karmic 64-bit)! So please don't get angry if something terrible happens with your installation, but I do encourage you to post your experience with it in the comments here, especially if something bad happens so that others may avoid going through your misery.

Oh and if you're interested in our myBalsamiq webapp, then definitely check out Peldi's awesome sneak peak screencast on the company blog.

Once in a Lifetime

As a young man, I was fond of listening to a lot to Talking Heads, so although the song describes a character dealing with their mid-life crisis (of which I believe mine are (mostly) over), I felt no other title to this introductory post would best describe my feelings: I am overwhelmed by joining Peldi and the gang at Balsamiq to do what I believe will be some of the most fulfilling work to come in some twenty years in challenging startup environments.  The reason is that if Balsamiq with its good humour prides itself on "adding flavor", the pun is not innocent in the sense that it takes the right combination of ingredients, process and intention (or vision) to bring a product like Balsamiq Mockups to the desktops and wikis of so many satisfied customers.

Entrepreneurship being above all a human endeavor, clearly the ingredients are there !  Not only is our small distributed team a joy to work with, but our  partners and customers provide a rich foundation for improvement and building the future through conversations taking place all around the clock whether they concern our products or are simply encouragements do do even better.  Our processes are agile and ruthlessly focused on bringing  value to our customers through new features, enhancements, bug fixes, and usability improvements.  Release cycles are short and feedback is only a tweet or a post on our community site at GetSatisfaction away.  Finally, it only takes briefly studying Balsamiq's track record to understand that on top of all of this rich substrate of ingredients on which to build a successful business, we have in our founder Peldi, the rare quality of non compromising leadership based on values.

Now I know all of this through experience because among other business activities, I have been working with Peldi and Marco in stealth mode all of this past year on our our webapp project MyBalsamiq.  So I am thrilled to be able from now on to focus all of my time on MyBalsamiq and bring the product out the door so that our customers old and new will be in the position use  Mockups online with their customers and co-workers. Thank you Peldi for making this possible !

Finally, please note that this is a brand new blog at Balsamiq!  The Balsamiq Tech Blog will be a place for us to engage technical discussions focused on the tools, technology and processes that we use to build our products such as Flex,  Grails or agile software development.  This will also be the place for us to talk about the modules we release as open source. Hopefully all of this will be helpful to our customers and beyond, and the benefits of learning and improving software development skills with our readers will be mutual.