Is writing a blOg post a distraction? :)

That goes against your advice of getting away from technology to avoid burnout.

I completely forgot about provisioning profiles. Oh the amount of times I've said, "Fuck provisioning profiles".

Agree it's not so bad. Just took 2 days to figure out how to do it. 2 days I'd rather have spent making the app more awesome. If on average other developers - I like to think I'm at least average :) - spent this long then that's like a million hours that they've spent on their build config instead of making their apps more awesome.

No matter what's happened to date, I'd hope that future developers will find your rant pretty quickly and end up saving the 2 days.

Oh I love the way Xcode handles this. Just setup multiple targets and use a preprocessor macro to switch between configurations. A nice drop down to select from when you're building. It's bliss! Learning the iOS way took me way less time than figuring it out for Android and it was a nicer solution.

I think people view this as too techy of a solution and I think people rely on their IDEs for this sort of thing too much, but after trying to automate my Azure deployments (local web, dev emulator, prod), I finally gave up and just resorted to having to manually comment/uncomment things in files and flex dropdown boxes across Visual Studio everytime I wanted to change environments. And I paid the 45-minute deploy time tax every time I forgot to change one of them when I deployed.

I'd have killed for a simple macro syntax to use within my config files. Hell, at one point I was actually (stupidly, one of the more futile tasks I've ever tried) editting the MSBUILD files by hand.

Thanks Zambo. I couldn't find a way to set a custom debug key in Eclipse - I'm using IntelliJ but this frustrated me so much I was considering migrating to Eclipse.

I was also using a debug/release flag previously but kept forgetting to change it when I sent the release build out for testing.

Great post, I'm working on my build tonight and this'll come in handy. I usually end up just changing the Maps API key locally and never committing it which kinda sucks.

For Eclipse you can set the debug key here: Window > Preferences > Android > Build > Custom debug keystore. That's for the normal Eclipse/android build process.

Comes in handy when developing on multiple machines as you can't update an app that was signed with a different debug key (must uninstall first).

Handy to know that setting exists. Thanks dude.

It's awesome that you want to contribute to the community in this way but I'd say these kinds of tutorials are very well covered already.

As a developer I've found there's a gap in more specific IDE & framework tutorials. Perhaps focus your efforts there?