Mobile web development tools. What's yours?

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1

Hi everybody,
I’m looking for new tools to improve my mobile development process.
Currently, I’m using these one:

Debugging: Weinre
It’s a remote debugging tool that allows you debug web pages on a mobile device such as a phone.
It looks like Web Inspector and works quite well even if it is JS based. Useful for debugging on a real device (like the iPhone)

Load times analysis: Slowy
It’s a tool to simulate a custom connection conditions. It allows you customize the connection parameters (like bandwidth limit and latency) and test your website as if you are on a mobile network (even if you are working on a local server). It’s really handy when you want to see how a website behaves with a real-world connection.

Opera Mobile Emulator
It’s a desktop emulator of the widely adopted mobile browser. It allows you view a website with custom resolution, pixel density, input mode and more.

What about yours? Do you have any other useful tools that improves you mobile development?
I will update this post with the coolest stuff posted :slight_smile:

2

Thanks for the opera link, they are one of the best, and most underrated development teams out there. Looks like a very handy tool.

3

Yes, Opera softwares are really useful and well done, even if inside the community the software house is a bit underestimated.

4

How do you bring up the dragonfly tools when in the opera mobile emulator? Aren’t they included?

Also, does the mobile emulator actually represent a webkit browser or merely sets a user agent and dimension using the presto engine? The reason I ask is because it look slike that is what it is doing considering I am developing something with Sencha Touch 2 and it does not work at all. Which would be expected considering it is webkit only.

5

@oddz
Opera Mobile Emulator uses Opera’s own rendering engine, not Webkit! So, it truly emulates a mobile bowser, but the behavior is different from Webkit based browsers (as Safari Mobile or Android browser).
If you are looking for a global analysis on how it works, this link covers almost everything: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mobile-emulator/

6

Weinre looks awesome – would have killed for something like that more than a few times.

Some other stuff we use:

a) Real mobile devices. Emulators and test tools can only tell half the story.
b) Apple iOS emulator – can come in handy in a pinch, especially for some network scenarios where you can’t get the mobile onto the network to see the development site. Also great for screenshots and such.

Don’t get enough traffic from Android or WinMo to care that much, but we’ll look at some other tools when we do.