Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Adobe Shadow [Android/iOS] - Pair devices up to your desktop and they will shadow what you do there...

Venture Beat - Adobe launches Shadow, a new toolkit for mobile developers

"Tonight, Adobe has unveiled Shadow, a convenient new set of tools for mobile web developers to find and fix cross-platform problems.

First, Shadow lets you see one app running across an almost unlimited number of devices. You pick the devices and sync them via WiFi with your desktop computer, and when you open a web page and turn on Shadow, those devices will “follow” your clicks through each page, allowing you to see what’s broken, what works, and how the whole shebang looks on a range of smaller screens.

...

And as many devs look away from native apps and toward mobile web development, Adobe is siding with them. “Shadow is targeted at the open web as a platform,” Bowman continued. In the not-too-distant past, another Adobe exec, Danny Winokur, wrote, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

So, with Wifi pairing, synchronous browsing, sleep “deprivation” for synced devices, remote inspection of code, in-browser code editing and debugging, Bowman said, Shadow “allows [developers] to work with the same precision that they have on the desktop.”

Currently, Shadow works for iOS and Android mobile devices. “We felt like, because this is such a clear pain point, it was better to get it out sooner than to provide a complete range of mobile clients,” said Bowman. “But we’ll look at the mobile browser share and invest accordingly… There’s no reason we couldn’t create a BlackBerry or a Windows Phone 7 client.”

Shadow will support Android versions 2.2 and greater, including Ice Cream Sandwich...."

Now that's a new product filling a need (as apposed to a product looking for a need to fill). And while it doesn't test user interaction, I can still see where this could coming in handy. Will be keeping my eyes open for a Windows compatible version...

No comments: