So I backed the Photon on Kickstarter a while ago and finally had a chance to play with it.
When you first get the Photon you need to attach it to a wifi network and thats pretty straight forward with thier iPhone App.
Particles Web IDE is pretty slick and you can send code straight from the browser to the device but I prefer something more local so I downloaded their installed their node CLI. The also have a local IDE called Particle Dev which you can use to write/verify/cloud compile your code then send the *.bin to the device.
Node and dfu-util are required for this:
brew install node
brew install dfu-util
npm install -g particle-cli
particle flash --usb firmware.bin
The code is still compiled on Particle’s servers (boo) but at least now I can flash locally.