I want to test a website to see how it works with the iPhone but I don't own an iPhone or an iPod touch. Is there a way I can test how the site works on them without owning one?
What I'm really after is fixing how Stackoverflow's WMD markdown editor works on the iPhone. I hear that the hyperlink and image prompts are created too high. I think I know how to fix that but it's pretty tough to develop blind.
If you own a Mac, you can download the iPhone SDK which comes with an iPhone simulator. It works not only for debugging a native app but also for browsing the web.
If you have Safari on your computer, you can enable the "Develop" menu under Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar.
With this enabled, you can go to Develop > User Agent, and change the user-agent string to the device you want your browser to report to the web server as.
By resizing the window to the appropriate width, you can emulate what the site will look like on the iPhone.
The upside of this is that it's quick, it works on both Windows and Mac, and you don't need the iPhone SDK installed. You can also browse iPhone-specific versions of websites that catch user-agent strings directly from your PC.
The downside is obviously your Safari browser on your PC will behave quicker than on the actual device (especially in regard to javascript performance); it displays plugins and shows fonts that may not be available on the actual iPhone OS; a lack of multi-touch support and "snapping" to columns while scrolling; no auto-rotation; no multi-touch/pinch-zoom; widgets will look different; etc.
Just a notice on this old thread - we have now enabled live testing on iPhones and iPads via vnc at CrossBrowserTesting.com.
Ken - Founder
There is a free app on the mac that emulates the iPhone browser: iPhoney
I don't purport to have done more than a web search, but the problem seems to be solved by several products that are "iPhone web app emulators."
http://www.testiphone.com/
http://marketcircle.com/iphoney/
Related
I'm using win7.
and i have website which i want to test it with iPhone browser environment.
which it's use most flash (jISFR).
this is the website i talking for,
http://www.hamuranalodge.com/
may you can see menu navigation is using flash jSIFR, which it's seems not work in iPhone, and want to fix it. of course i need iphone Testing for it.
Is there somebody know how i can test it with iphone browser?
may there is a software can do it?
or a website give service like that?
Thanks
Not a perfect solution but you might be able to test it on the Android browser instead. The SDK runs on all major OSs and is free to download and install. Just make sure that flash support is turned off. I'm pretty sure iPhone and Android both use WebKit so you should get similar behaviour on both.
You could use the iPhone simulator if you have access to a Mac.
There are sites like this:
http://www.testiphone.com/
but this one doesn't work very well, at least not for this particular request. Go there and point it at www.worldsbk.com - it renders the Flash block on the top right hand side just fine on my desktop computer (Firefox3 Mac OS X), but have a look here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigiain/5037577763/
to see a screen grab of that page from my iPhone... Note the big grey block where the flash bit should be...
Can I successfully do iPhone/iPad web development (not native apps) on Windows, and without having an iPhone/iPad device?
I.e. work like PSD-to-iPhone-optimized XHTML/CSS layout.
I’m interested to learn about and make iPhone/iPad optimized websites. Any tips? How different will it be from desktop? What’s different other than the smaller screen?
From experience I will say the only true way to test for the iPad is to test on an iPad. I have been developing a site in html5 specifically for an iPad and we initially used the iPhone to test. The drag function we had implemented with jQuery had worked almost perfectly on the iPhone but after the client had tested on the iPad they came back to us and said the function did not work period and they were correct.
I guess this could change depending on what type of development you are doing. From experience I would say either A. Make some trips to the apple store B. Make friends with iPad owner C. Buy and iPad
yes for an ipohne emulator... try MobiOne.
It's a good application to test the pages in iphone like environment.
http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/
I don’t think you can really do iPhone/iPad development successfully without an iPhone/iPad at all, whether on Windows, Mac or Commodore 64.
If you’re serious about iPhone/iPad development, how could you not try your software out yourself on the devices it’s going to run on? Your clients are going to want code that works on the iPhone/iPad. You need an iPhone/iPad to check that it works.
if your developing a web app then i think you can use this: http://ipadpeek.com/
The answer is: Yes you can absolutely do iPhone and iPad website development on a Windows PC.
However, you really should/must test the result on an actual iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Especially if you are integrating in any way with special device features like the dialing feature of the phone. (Yes you can have phone numbers in a webpage trigger dialing when you tap on them.)
However, you can do the bulk of the development on Windows, testing the WebApp in Safari or Chrome, which are the most fully compliant HTML5 WebKit based browsers out there.
Also highly recommend using an HTML5 touch framework like jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch. This will go a long way to ensuring that your WebApp is optimized for the screen size and touch gestures of the mobile devices.
Remember that you can't deploy a pure WebApp to the app store, only download it from a website. You'll need a native wrapper like PhoneGap for that. And to compile a PhoneGap wrapped WebApp you'll need XCode on a Mac.
But there's a lot of power in adding your WebApp to the home screen on iOS. No native code involved and you get a full screen webapp with a home screen icon, loading image and no browser toolbars. Highly recommended.
On the Mac I got the iPhone Simulator but under Windows and Linux enviroments I need a webbrowser which emulates the behaviour and size of the iPhone browser. I'm not looking for a website with a frame with the iPhone screen size but an actual application. Prefably webkit based so it will behave as much like the iPhone as possible. It should also be able to send the same browser headers as MobileSafari in the iPhone and if not it should be possible to modify the headers. That could be done in a menu in the program, support plugins(which have the power to modify headers) or the progam should be opensource.
It might not exist and if not thanks anyway. However if it does that would be awesome. If you know a program which have some of the mentioned features but not all of them an no one have posted a better one feel free to post a link/the name of that browser (still better then nothing or a framed site in Safari).
tldr: iPhone like browser, same window size and headers as MobileSafari.
Try one of the following:
Blackbaud iPhone Browser Simulator
iPhone Drift web browser for Windows
MobiOne iPhone and Palm Pre emulator
So far as I can see, only the first of these actually uses Safari as the rendering engine, and it is using Safari for Windows rather than Mobile Safari, but it should be close enough I think.
try iphonedrift on windows
I am looking for iPhone emulation software to test a couple of internal web applications against the iPhone. There are a few quirks occuring with iPhone users that would like to fix but I am unsure how to test them.
For example one of the issues is that numbers are showing up as phone number links on the iPhone which 99% of the time is incorrect. On regular Windows Safari this doesn't occur.
There are also formatting issues with fonts and spacing that occur on no other broswer except the iPhone version of Safari.
Emulator must be free and work under Windows. Suggestions?
There is a Windows build of WebKit embedded inside an iPhone-like shape called Blackbaud iPhone Browser Simulator. You can download it here http://labs.blackbaud.com/NetCommunity/article?artid=662
If you're looking for general WebKit issues, Safari 4 and Chrome use fairly similar builds of WebKit. Most issues can be troubleshooted in that manner.
For things like the automated tel://########## hyperlinking, though, you're likely SOL. That's an iPhone specific customisation of WebKit. It can be disabled (details in someone else's answer here) but you're not going to be able to test for the behaviour on Windows.
Another iphone webkit emulator :
http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/
Build by genuitec, the creators of myEclipse. It's better than using safari desktop as it's a modified version of webkit in order to have the same behavior than safari iPhone. But in reality, it's not 100% equal !
I'm working on a web application, and we are targeting the iPhone and iPod Touch. I'm familiar with the debugging tools for FireFox and IE (e.g. Firebug and IE Developer Toolbar), but I can't find anything for the iPod. I am not looking forward to using alert as my main debugging tool, especially when I expect mouse events to be one of the major issues.
Is this really the state of the art? What tools do you recommend?
Also, how similar is the html layout on an iPhone to that of Safari running on Windows? On a Mac?
The iPhone version of Safari includes a debug console that can be very handy. Settings > Safarai > Developer.
You can also use the Simulator in the iPhone SDK. There's no extra debugging, but it's easier than using a physical device all the time.
You can also use the desktop version of Safari for many things.
The web tools that target the iPod Touch and iPhone arenas include
[iPhone Remote Debug Console](
http://code.google.com/p/iphonedebug/)
BlackBaud Simulator for Windows
[MobileSafari Simulator](
http://www.testiphone.com/)
[iPhoney](
http://marketcircle.com/iphoney/)
While WebKit has a remote inspector, it is hard to enable on an actual iOS device (at least without jailbreak) and so most tools for it are simulator-only. iWebInspector looks promising for this, but keep in mind the simulator's WebKit library is not identical to the device's.
That's where weinre comes in. With weinre, you can "debug a web page displayed on your phone from your laptop". How it works is you run its custom HTTP server that hosts two things:
a JavaScript file you include on the page you want to debug
an Inspector page that you load on the machine you want to debug from
You start the server e.g. java -jar Downloads/weinre.jar --boundHost -all- --httpPort 4242 and then put a script tag like <script src="http://weinre-server-name.local:4242/target/target-script-min.js"> in the source code for your webpage and load the inspector by navigating to e.g. http://weinre-server-name.local:4242/client. When you load the target page on an iPhone on your local WiFi connection, the connection will show up in the client page on your mainframe and you can use the Inspector tabs to view/edit the page on the iPhone.
It has some limitations (no Javascript breakpoints and such) and can be a little laggy, but overall it's pretty magic.
There is also a nice tool called iWebInspector
http://www.iwebinspector.com/