I want to use mobile emulator/simulators to test my website with. I only found Opera Mini (http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/) and Windows Mobile 6 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=9263)
Where can I download emulators for more recent mobile devices?
P.S. Please let me know if this does not belong in StackOverflow, thanks.
I found MITE to be most helpful.
Even better, you get a lot of support for the free version, but (if you pay for Pro) you get almost every mobile browser out there, the ability to remotely test (load speed) and a lot of other cool features.
Related
So I have a website and I mean to make 2 version of it, the desktop version (with full features) and mobile version (simplification of the desktop version). I'm using media query in CSS to adjust the style. It works well in native browser. When I open my web using native browser it will show the mobile version style. But somehow when I open my web using Opera Mini, it keeps showing the desktop version instead.
I have googled it and didn't found any clue. Any idea how does it happen?
Thanks!
I finally found what's wrong with it. Turns out I was stupidly using #media screen only and Opera Mini doesn't seem handle it well. I've googled it for hours. Someone said actually Opera Mini supports #media screen but other people said that the right media property for Opera Mini is #media handheld. Well, I tried to play safe by simply changing it to #media all. And it works!
There are a number of reasons why Opera Mini is showing the desktop version of the site. The most likely is that your website is not properly detecting Opera Mini as a mobile site and is not returning the correct content. If you're using some plugin or other piece of software that is automatically handling the routing of desktop vs. mobile for you, that might be the culprit. Also, it's possible that this is happening by design, because of how Opera Mini works.
Opera Mini runs web content through Opera's own proxy servers and attempts to 'optimize' the content before delivering it to the user. That is, content is rendered first on the proxy server and then delivered to the device. This of course creates all kinds of complications for someone who is trying to deliver a consistent mobile web experience to their users. Fortunately, Opera provides a development guide to help give you a better sense of what's going on and how to cope with it.
Opera Mini is, in my experience, a very difficult browser to work with. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we server a very limited Wikipedia (and sibling project) experience when we detect someone's using Opera Mini.
You should definitely read through the opera mini development guide and make sure that any device detection you're doing is correctly recognizing opera mini as a mobile browser. If you're just using media queries, you may either want to reconsider a more robust approach to mobile detection, or adjust your design accordingly to work for opera mini. Good luck!
Hi I am developing a mobile version of my WordPress site using WP Touch Pro, are there any good emulators so I can see the results on different platforms?
yup:
http://www.electricplum.com/dlsim.html
will show you ipad and iphone simulations.
If you're on a Mac, you can use the free iOS SDK which includes an iOS Simulator. Android also has one; it takes a few extra steps to setup, but it's also free and cross-platform. Blackberry has one as well, pretty much all platforms do. I develop mobile sites all the time and these are the tools I use, and they're invaluable.
This has a few different emulations available: http://mobiletest.me/
This is a great extension for chrome , User-Agent Switcher for Chrome
Is there a good all in one emulator for testing mobile websites. Just using 'media queries and need to test on predominantly iphone, blackberry, android, and windows 7 phones.
Many thanks,
C
There is no one solution that will work on all these platforms however the SDKs for all include simulators/emulators and the best part is that all but for the iPhone are free.
BlackBerry Simulators
Android Emulator
Windows Phone 7 Emulator
The iPhone SDK also includes a simulator (Mac only) but if you need to test on a PC, you can do a pretty good job using http://iphone4simulator.com/ running in Safari for Windows.
As with all simulator/emulator usage, these are good for initial testing but you need to use an actual device to get true results.
Also note that different BlackBerry devices use different default browsers. Android devices also use varying versions of WebKit so you may see some variation between actual devices which isn't shown in the emulator.
In addition to Matt's reply, I think you should also test the different browsers available for smartphones.
For example the popular Opera mobile: http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/
You might find http://quirktools.com/screenfly/ very useful for testing mobile websites on different screen sizes. It's not as true as a native emulator, but it allows you to test several phones, tablets, etc. at one site and you don't have to install any software.
try http://www.browserstack.com/. This one is not free, but it gives a trial period of 30 minutes for each account we create
Try Mobile web browser emulator this free tools help you testing mobile websites
If you just want to simulate the mobile device user agent and screen resolutions, also check out chrome's mobile device simulator https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/device-mode#enable-device-mode
I am willing to develop a mobile application. I wish to have something working for android, windows mobile, symbian and blackberry.
Which is the best way to do that?
I had read here:
You could aim to wrap the sections of
the platform specific APIs (iPhone SDK
etc.) that you use with your own
interfaces. In doing so you are
effectively hiding the platform
specific libraries and making your
design and code easier to manage when
dealing with differences in the
platforms.
I was hoping there exists a framework that does this for me, but it doesn't exist or I didn't find any.
I feel that sort of things will make my code harder to maintain and perhaps it's better to have one version for each platform.
Anyone with experience in the field?
Another links of interest:
most-promising-mobile-platforms
long-term-potential-of-iphone-windows-mobile-development-platforms
Does Java not count (in various guises)
Java on Symbian
Java for Windows Mobile
Java on Blackberry
Android Java Virtual Machine
It should be simpler to manage API differences in a consistent language/runtime platform where capabilities can be assessed in-code ... and configurations of code made at build-time.
As much as I dislike Java, it is fairly ubiquitous. As for the iPhone ... apart from it being much hyped and locked down ... you can get Java to run on jail-broken phones ...
What happened to Apple's open and friendly appearance? The cynic-inside knows the answer ;)
You might want to look into PhoneGap (http://phonegap.com/). From their own description page:
PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.
If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.
In addition to using JavaScript, it supports JavaScript acccess to native controls and features of the phones (GPS, accelerometers etc...).
There really isn't any magic bullet that I'm aware of. Even within just the Blackberry platform, there are tons of different devices with different capabilities, screen resolutions, etc. And that's just from one, single manufacturer; Symbian and Windows Mobile are likely even worse.
The answer is likely that you should focus on relatively new and consistent platforms (accordingly with very few and all pretty much similar devices), like Android and iPhone OS, if you really want to reduce your code forking and maximize your audience.
My advice will almost certainly change within a few years when there are nine different iPhone OS devices and two dozen Android platforms.
The first question to ask yourself is if you need a native application, if you do not then designing a mobile web site solution should give you the most cross compatibility, failing that I would make a iPhone and J2ME solution (the J2ME can then be ported for Android relatively easily) for the greatest coverage of users
Or investigate Movilizer. Supports iOS, Android, WinPhone, WinMobile, Desktop PCs, embedded devices, ... and many more. It uses a design once run anywhere approach.
http://www.movilizer.com
try out different cross platform dev tools,
Developing cross platform mobile application
I need to develop some programs for mobile devices but haven't decided the platform to build upon. I'm looking for Palm or Pocket PC devices that have Touch screen and Wi-Fi connection and are cheep because I'll need to buy several of them.
I don't really need camera, mp3 players, video players, pdf readers or anything else since the apps are going to be simple data collection to feed via wireless to a server database.
I'm proficient with C and C#. I could learn Java if I had to.
What devices do you recommend? Linux devices maybe?
PS: Changed the title because I don't want a flamewar between platforms. Please, don't answer with Windows Mobile sucks/rules. I'm looking for devices instead.
Thanks
Windows Mobile
It supports C#, and Visual Studio comes with the mobile SDK. So if you know C# you probably already have the tools you need. And in spite of the iPhone/iPodTouch buzz, the Windows Mobile deployment is still 10X greater.
In order of preference
Neo Freerunner
Maemo & the N800 (cheap)
Beagleboard
If you are comfortable with Visual Studio then programming for windows mobile is extremely easy. The SDK for mobile comes with emulators for all the latest and popular versions of windows mobile- and you can even debug on teh device itself using a USB cable.
On windows mobile you have a choice: Develop a .Net application or develop native (likely MFC based). Either one gives you a great development environment.
As far as iPhone development goes- you would need an apple computer to install and use iPhone SDK- and you can't run an iPhone app on your phone. You would have to go through the process of getting it registered with iTunes for you to install your own apps on your own phone!
When I first started playing with mobile development I had a few questions:
Can I develop using my favorite IDE- Visual Studio. Will it be as easy as developing a desktop app: yes.
Will I be able to access the internet from my application without 'unlocking' or in some other way enabling the phone that was not intended by the service provider? yes.
Will I be able to access device specific functionality such as GPS easily? Is there good support for doing so within the API? Yes.
You should probably target the Windows Mobile platform. The Palm platform is rather archaic and no longer widely used. The development environment is also rather spartan, while Microsoft has full IDEs available for Windows Mobile development. You might also consider the iPhone/iPod touch platform - I have a feeling the number of devices will multiply at an exponential rate and I've heard that developing applications is much easier due to the completeness of the system stack.
You should probably at least evaluate the Apple iPod Touch. It certainly meets your basic "touch screen + WiFi" spec, and your users presumably won't object to all the the other nice features that will come along for the ride.
I don't know what your cutoff for "cheap" is, but $299 for the base model seems pretty reasonable for a high-quality touch screen and WiFi in a pocketable device.
Windows Mobile and CE used to suck, really, really badly. These days however it's definitely passable and worth checking out, especially if you code C#.
Just remember that it is the baby brother of the full framework and has nowhere near enough toys and throws a lot of NotImplementedExceptions. :)
Blackberry publishes its SDK on its web site. Its apps run J2ME, so with some Java experience it shouldn't be too difficult to get started. They also give you an emulator. Disclaimer: I have no experience in writing Blackberry apps, but I looked into it once.
I would not recommend a PalmOS based handset. I have written code for PalmOS and it's about as painful as writing raw Win32 code in C. Since Palm has switched its high end handsets to Windows Mobile, PalmOS will just remain stagnant and only run on the slower, less capable hardware.
If I were to write a mobile app, I'd agree that Windows Mobile is worth checking out.
It all depends on the users who you are targeting at, If you are looking for a wide market then you should be fine with J2ME/Blackberry . However most of them lack the touchscreen and wifi features ( The HTC range of phones [WIFI/TouchScreen/Windows Mobile] have a JVM built with it),so it would work on most of the Windows devices also.
If you are making a more niche product, moving with the current buzz 'iphone' will be good . Windows Mobile is also worth checking out
The best option here would be the Neo Freerunner, with that device you can build a dedicated unit were every aspect is made especially for you're needs. The Freerunner is WiFi enabled, and has a touch interface. If you use the Qt SDK, a lot of the work is already done for you. It comes complete with emulator, as a Live linux cd. You can run in a WM, such as wmplayer. Everything is included.
I'm not gonna lie, it will take tweaking. But the final product would be really nice and intuitive.
Looking at Windows Mobile devices, your requirement of touchscreen pretty much sets your pricing at the higher end of the spectrum. You'll get those things you say you don't need just because of that.
Here's expansys's selection of touchscreens.
Mobdeal is a handy one too as that effectively filters all phones by features.
I've developed against the HTC TYTN 2, HTC Touch Diamond and randomly a PSION Teklogix Ikon
There's generally very little difference between these models, some manufacturers have SDKs that can help sometimes.
I think your cheapest option will probably be something like getting HTC TYTN 2s on ebay. They're pretty old now (hence cheap) but have Wifi, camera, touchscreen, qwerty keypad all the things you seem to be after.
you can target iPhone "touch" platform with Apple's iPhone SDK. the development environment requires a Mac, but you can get the entire IDE + tool chain + excellent debugging and profiling tools for free. And the free documentation is top notch.
As a registered iPhone developer, it is free (no cost) to target the simulator, which is sufficient for most learning and development you'll likely need to up front.
To target the actual hardware device (and up to and including release/selling your app on the Apple's AppStore) is only $99/yr. If you got an iPod Touch for your hardware target, most of the SDK applies and you are not tied into a service contract for an iPhone.
iPhone app development environment is in Objective-C, but it is a really productive, object-oriented environment so do not concerned that that may be a language you are unfamiliar with.
If you decide that your mobile app(s) would be better suited as webapps, the iPhone/iPod touch platform again is an industry leader in this space, and you have the additional benefit or being able to target other mobile platforms (and not necessarily be tied to one mobile SDK).