I can feel myself getting stupider. Help me bend the rules.

brown.jonathan · October 30, 2014, 2:07pm

Hello everyone. I’m obviously new to the Corona SDK. I’ve been asked by a friend of mine if I could help him out with an app he’s developing. I’ve checked it out and it has promise and I want to get involved. I’ve got a lot of learning to do and quite a bit of catching up so that I can be of any use to him. I have experience in some other programming languages though so it shouldn’t be too difficult to pick this up. I hope.

Here’s the kicker though. My employer has recently transferred me to a new office location where I work on a military base. This particular location doesn’t allow us to bring personal laptops to work. I’m required to use the PCs provided by the military which are considerably locked down. We work between 60 and 72 hours per week but I get several hours per day where I have nothing to do and I’d like to fill that time coding for this project. I’ve asked their Information Assurance department about installing the Corona SDK on my particular machine and I’ve been denied.

I can’t plug USB devices in to the machines but I am allowed to burn CDs or DVDs and view or run the files on them as long as I don’t install anything. So here’s what I’m thinking. I forget what it’s called but I know for a while there was the ability to run applications in a sort of sandbox mode on a USB thumb drive. These were basically portable applications that would run on the thumb drive and never install anything on the machine. But as I mentioned already, I can’t use a thumb drive. Can any of the geniuses here think of a way where I could do this same thing but with a DVD or CD R/W disk? I know it’d be extremely slow but I’m willing to give it a try anyway. The other thought would be to using something like a Live CD similar to what you get when you download and install Ubuntu Linux. What do you guys think? Help me find a way to develop using the Corona SDK all while staying within the boundaries set by the military IA department.

I can feel myself getting stupider by the minute at work during our idle times doing absolutely nothing or mindlessly browsing the internet; waiting for the time to pass. I need a project. I need this project.

_memo · October 30, 2014, 9:04pm

Do you have access to the internet? If you do, you can buy a virtual machine somewhere and use that. Some can be accessed through your native client (e.g. remote desktop in Windows) and if you have firewall issues, some are even accessible through a web browser, so just standard port 80. This way, you could get away with installing nothing, or possibly just a browser plug-in.

brown.jonathan · October 31, 2014, 3:35am

memo,

That’s a great idea. I hadn’t considered that. Would you happen to have one in particular you might recommend? I think I would have to go with the type that uses a web browser on port 80. I think I might have a better chance of getting that to work.

jonjonsson · October 31, 2014, 3:51am

I haven’t tried CoronaViewer but probably you will not need a simulator if you use that. But looks like it required Pro subscription though

http://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/06/26/coronaviewer-instant-on-device-previews/

Edit: Oh and it required Dropbox, I’m guessing that is not standard on military computers

elbowroomapps · October 31, 2014, 6:06am

If you want to develop on a remote Mac, check out these 2 services:

http://www.macincloud.com

http://xcodeclub.com

I don’t know if they will work for your specific case.

rob · October 31, 2014, 11:21pm

There have been developers who have taken Corona Viewer and a Text Editor for the iPad and worked on their app directly from the iPad. I don’t know if you have an iPad with 4G service (and if that would be allowed given you can’t bring your own computers), but since it’s off network that might be a possibility (its not like plugging a personal laptop into the network). However Corona Viewer is only available to Pro and Enterprise subscribers.

Rob

_memo · October 30, 2014, 9:04pm