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Currently with the PlayBook 1.0.1 AIR SDK the error reporting for signing and debug token issues can be far too generic. The biggest culprit of this is the BarSigner 500 unsigned error. The team is actively working on returning more specific error messages for all the various use cases. In the meantime here is a list of the reasons why this error would occur. Hopefully this will help you debug the issue faster when you see this error.

• There is no debug token on the device.
• The debug token on the device has expired.
• The debug token author does not match the author of the application being deployed.
• The debug token author id does not match the author id of the application being deployed.

The process for developing and deploying applications to the PlayBook simulator is a little different then that of the device. For the simulator you simply place it into development mode and you can deploy your un-signed applications. There are 2 additional steps that you need to do in order to deploy and debug your applications on the device.

The first step is to create and upload a debug token to the device. This entire step can be done with the command line, but is much easier to do with the Flash Builder plugin. Before you can create your debug token you must sign up for signing keys. This can be done from the BlackBerry Developer Zone form found here. You should get your keys the following day so may sure to sign up for your keys early so you aren’t waiting a day to develop for the device. What the debug token does is associates your application with you and your device. Watch the video below for a complete list of steps on how to create and upload.

The second thing you need to do is add the author and authorId tags to your blackberry-tablet.xml file. This associates your application with your debug token and allows it to run on any device with that debug token installed on it. With this you should be able to deploy your application to your device as many times as you need.

The alternative to using debug tokens is to sign your application every time you want to load it on to the device. This would mean that for every little code change it would need to be re-signed. There are 2 things to keep in mind when signing your application. The first is that the version number has to be incremented every single time you sign your application. If you try to sign an application with the same version number it will throw an error. You can read this page for more information about assigning a version number to your application. The second thing to keep in mind is you need to be connected to the internet in order to sign your application. Having to do these 2 things every time you wanted to test your application on the device is unreasonable, which is why debug tokens were created in order to provide greater flexibility in developing and deploying to the actual device.

If you have gone through and followed all the steps in the video below for creating debug tokens, your applications is all ready to be signed. It is as simple as right clicking on the project and selecting Export. I hope the video below helps you get your application on deployed to the device.

PlayBook Debug Tokens and Signing from Julian Dolce on Vimeo.

The most recent release of the Adobe AIR SDK is version 2.6. With this version of the SDK you can target the AIR 2.6 runtime on multiple platforms. However, one platform that you cannot yet target yet is the BlackBerry PlayBook. At launch the PlayBook, device and simulator, only support the AIR 2.5 runtime. This means that any application which targets anything higher then AIR 2.5 will not work on the PlayBook. There are a couple of things to consider when developing for PlayBook using the AIR 2.6 SDK.

The first and biggest issue is that the newer versions of the Flex 4.5 Hero Framework only support AIR 2.6. This means that you will only be able to create ActionScript only projects, which do not use any of the Flex Hero components. The public preview of Flash Builder 4.5, which is available on Adobe Labs, contains a very early version of the Flex Hero Framework and targets AIR 2.5, which is why this works today. However, when Flash Builder 4.5 ships and anyone using the pre-release version will not be able to create Flex Hero applications for the PlayBook until the runtime is updated.

When using Flash Builder and the AIR 2.6 SDK for developing your applications, Flash Builder will auto generate a application descriptor file, which targets the AIR 2.6 runtime. If you try to run this in the Simulator or on the PlayBook device the application will instantly crash without any real reason. There are 2 small items that you can do in order to workaround this issue. These steps are meant to be done with the BlackBerry Tablet OS AIR SDK 1.0.1

First, you need to make sure you compile your swf to Flash Player 10. This can easily be done with the following command if you are using the command line. -swf-version=10. If you are using Flash Builder you can go to Project > Properties > ActionScript Compiler and place it into the Additional Compiler Arguments field.

The second thing you need to do is force your application to target the AIR 2.5 runtime. Because you may be targeting AIR 2.6 for other platforms you do not want to change it directly in the -app.xml file. To get around this the PlayBook has an option to force the air version to a specific value when packaging your application. To set this you can use the following command on the command line -forceAirVersion 2.5. Or if you are using Flash Builder you can go to Project > Properties > ActionScript Build Packaging > BlackBerry Tablet OS > Advanced and place the command in the extra packaging options field.

With these 2 workarounds you should be able to now target AIR 2.6 for iOS and Android and 2.5 for the PlayBook. I hope that helps solve some of the confusion people are having

With the new release of the BlackBerry Tablet SDK 1.0.1 and the release of the PlayBook device, there is a new application capability that is required to access the PIN and serial number of the device. To access these properties in the SDK you can use the Device.pin and Device.serialNumber properties. However, if accessing these you must make sure you take into consideration that these values may be null. This will happen if the user does not grant your application permission to read those values. And we all know what happens when you try to access a null object in ActionScript. Crashy Crashy. Here is the documentation for the Device class as well as more information on add permissions to your application.

You will also need to re-compile your application with the 1.0.1 SDK in order to make this work correctly.

With the release of the PlayBook Tablet OS AIR SDK 1.0.1 we have improved the installation process greatly. With previous beta releases we realize, and heard clearly from the community, that it was difficult to get everything set up just right as there were a lot of steps and different options. We have done a great job at removing as many of the steps from the process as possible.

First, the SDK and the Simulator are 1 download and there is no longer 2 separate installers. When installing the SDK into Flash Builder it now supports 3 different versions, Flash Builder 4.0.1, Flash Builder “Burrito” Preview, which is available on Adobe Labs, and later pre-release versions of Flash Builder 4.5, which are available to Adobe pre-release members. This should save you from having multiple installs of Flash Builder on your machine. Also, the installer will now accept an AIR SDK which is 2.5 or higher. This means that you can use the AIR 2.6 SDK and any other future releases. The catch with this is that the Simulator and actual hardware only support the AIR 2.5 runtime and if your application targets anything higher it will crash.

Once you have the SDK installed you are ready to get the Simulator set up. Instead of installing an .iso for the Simulator we now ship an actual VMWare image, which you can simply open in VMWare. This image has the Simulator already set up with a default password, “playbook”, and already has Development Mode turned on by default. This removes a lot of the steps in previous beta releases to get the iso installed with the right settings. Also, the EULA has been removed and you no longer have to scroll through it entirely to accept it.

With these changes we have greatly reduced the number of clicks and documentation reading required to get developers up and running. We still have other things we want to improve and will be working on for upcoming releases. I can honestly say that these changes are a direct result of community feedback. Hopefully this is the first step into showing the community that we are truly listening to your feedback and want to make the process for developing application for the PlayBook, no matter which runtime on the device you are targeting, the best development experience out there.

Here is a video of the entire installation process.

BlackBerry Tablet OS AIR SDK 1.0.1 Installation from Julian Dolce on Vimeo.