Found a cool little write up on Adobe’s site about their product, Shadow.
Shadow allows for browser testing on both iOS and Android from a development machine. The only requirement is that all of the devices are chatting on the same network. For all the cool kids that are building mobile apps leveraging HTML, this is a welcome tool set.
Set up is easy and the installer directs you to the plugin pages for various environments. I dropped in the Chrome plugin.
Next, I fired up the plugin and the Android app. Pairing is simple. From the Android device, I chose my computer. The plugin on my dev machine asked for a pass code which is displayed on the mobile device. Enter the pass code and you’re all paired up.
I couldn’t figure out what to do next, but this is entirely my own fault. I don’[t really read instructions. I just refer to them when I get stuck. But, as soon as I navigated back to the Adobe site something marvelous happened. It immediately appeared on my device, as well. Neato!
But, this is only half the battle. When I dev, I do it on a a virtual machine on my dev box. I need Shadow to be able to mirror the view of web pages served off this VM.
And, of course, this requires me to root my Android device. There are a million ways to skin this cat. If you’re on a Captivate, go here.
Then, you need to set up entries in the hosts file. You can do that with some help from this site, and the vi editor available in BusyBox.
Next step – pass http connections through to my VM. Those details will vary depending on your environment. Looks like a big hairy mess from here.
