As part of our effort to automate taking screenshots, we also need the ability to spin up Android emulators via the command line. This all needs to run headless, so it's necessary to be able to spin up Android emulators from the command line. A quick look at my ps output showed this to be even simpler a task than I'd anticipated. To launch a new instance of the Android Player from the command line, all…

With a white label app platform like ours at Olo, generating screenshots for every app we publish can be a real chore. It makes sense for us to use simulators/emulators to do this, given the large number of device sizes we need to generate for, so it's not something we can easily farm out to a non-engineer to do manually without them spending an obscene amount of time on it. If you haven't noticed already,…

Refreshing provisioning profiles is a pain. Okay, everything about provisioning profiles is a pain. This pain is amplified once you add a continuous integration environment into the mix. When you add to that a white-label platform like ours with a ton of apps building in it, things get very frustrating. For every app we add to the system, not only do we need to provision everything properly in the developer portal, but we also need to…

In Xamarin Studio, if you look in the About dialog you'll find all sorts of information about the versions for all the various tools involved in building your apps. There's so much more to compiling an app than the version of Xamarin you have installed. There's the version of OS X, Android tools, Xcode, etc. Any one of these things is a significant data point in any app release you have. Every time we do a…