January 2013
1 post
IE help from Microsoft - Modern.ie
Microsoft have released a series of tools aimed at better testing and support of Internet Explorer. http://www.modern.ie/
What Microsoft are offering is actually pretty cool, a 3 month trial to browser stacks, a remote testing VM. This allows you to connect to a browser running on a Windows OS using a particular version of IE, from IE6 to 10. The only concession is 3 fixed resolutions,...
December 2012
1 post
Testing front end changes quickly and easily
In this post I will show you how to take lots of screenshots at lots of breakpoints, compare live sites to local changes, then use a diff tool to compare them all. The outcome, a quick and easy way to test front end changes. This is achieved by using a screen shot service, an image diff tool and a browser, screenshot as a service, PhantomJS and ChunkyPNG. You will also need to have NodeJS...
November 2012
2 posts
Viewing network traffic on any device
In this post, i will talk about how to view network traffic and the HAR (HTTP Archive) file. This is useful for doing several things, my initial intention was to discover network traffic from mobile devices. This was something i wanted to view in order to find out whether our vary headers and stats were correctly being logged, but there is also an interesting way to measure performance.
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4 tags
A week online with the Surface
For a week now, I have been using the Microsoft Surface, the latest gadget in the mobile world. A tablet computer in it’s basic form, but also a work device, featuring office applications and the Windows explorer. This device is not the first tablet that I have owned, I purchased a HP Touchpad at reduced cost over a year ago, though I stopped using it after a few months. Ultimately, it...
October 2012
1 post
3 tags
IE 10 on Windows8 - A few Windows tips
With Windows 8 now out, the final release of IE 10, both Desktop and Modern UI(formally Metro) browsers. They are the same, but have very different user interfaces, one touch based, the other a conventional Desktop browser. The RT verions, this is not Windows 8 RT, rather a seperate OS callled Windows RT, has an ARM implementation of the browser to.
The best devices to get in order to test...
September 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Keep up to date!
Over the last week or so, Nokia have been pushing updates to lots of phones, these are running the latest versions of Symbian, S60 V10 or Symbian Belle. Although the support list for this version of the OS for devices is small, the main ones are covered. These phones now have access to the latest version of the Symbian browser, Nokia Belle Refresh for Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia C7, Nokia...
3 tags
Colours in Android
The interesting thing about Android is it can sometimes behave differently, even on the same hardware. Here is a video playing on 2 Galaxy Nexus phones, the top is using Android 4.1(Jellybean), the bottom is using Android 4.0(ICS). When both phones are using the same auto brightness option, the phone will give a slightly different colour, note the individuals jacket. Nothing you can do here as...
July 2012
4 posts
2 tags
No More OS4
The end has come for our little Blackberry OS4 device. Eight or nine months ago it was still relevant, it had a solid user base which was slowly shrinking. However, the pressure for Blackberry juicers to upgrade seems to have become too much, mostly bowing to Android and iOS. While many of you will have given up testing on OS4, or perhaps not even started….It remained a more highly used...
1 tag
WEb INspector REmote
Weinre, a WEb INspector REmote tool for webkit browsers. It has been included in some tools such as the Adobe Shadow application, though this requires the device to have the application and the computer to have the app….and the browser to have the plugin.
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Weinre is a more difficult set up, but once down, allows for a more immediate benefit. If you were only looking to use...
3 tags
How long do mobile browsers last?
There have been a lot of articles recently that are talking about when to stop/drop support for IE, specifically IE8. This is a big deal for those who are stuck on Windows XP or Vista, but don’t have the option to update. So i started looking at what people will do with mobile browsers.
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The likes of Meego, WebOS and QNX have come and mostly fizzled away. In some cases, you may...
Ten things to remember when testing RWD
A few things to remember when doing a bit of testing.
10 - phones are bad
A lot of phones are slow, have lots of bloatware and use the browser as a way to search Google, rather than look at your beautiful website. Symbian, Android, BBOS and Windows phone can be put onto very slow hardware, so buying that hardware is essential. More importantly though, if you only test on high end android and...
June 2012
4 posts
Devices & Pixel Ratios
The idea of a 720p display on a phone is the norm, with 1080p probably coming over the next year or 2. With other devices like the iPad and iPhone with huge pixel counts, the use of images that exploit screens that have a pixel ratio of 2 is something everyone should look into doing.
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In my device selection post a few months back, i only had 2 HD phones, no i am not going to use the...
Landscape Changes
Here we have the web page in landscape view. The latest version is on the right, the older version on the left. The layout has changed in order to use the available screen width while keeping the larger image and maintaining the look and feel of the portrait layout
Before and After
A side by side of the live version of the site, right, and an early version left.
Tools
In a recent blog post i talked about what devices the BBC News team use for testing our responsive mobile site, in this post, i will talk about some of the tools you can use on these devices. This post will talk mostly about remote debugging, using Shadow and Chrome USB, but also front end work with Ripple and Proxylocal.
Chrome USB Debugging...
April 2012
2 posts
Is One Blackberry Enough?
In this post, we will look at why testing more than one Blackberry version or device may be the better way to go.
Blackberry OS
Blackberry phones, some of us love them, a lot of people don’t, but they are important to your development and testing. The Blackberry user base is quite large in the UK, but also has a solid global audience, it is mostly a non touch device group with limited...
Remember the Little Guy
It is sometimes easy to forget the devices that went head to head against the first iPhone, one such titan was the Nokia N96. A whopping 264 MHz CPU was the engine of this little gem, compared with the monster 412 MHz iPhone.
We can safely say the N96 has no business being called a smartphone, or can we?
The Why
In this post, I’m going to talk about more about the older phones and...
March 2012
2 posts
Testing
We thought we’d share some information on our testing process.
My name is David Blooman, I am the principal tester for responsive news, all questions and queries can be sent to me at @dblooman
When testing the devices, there are 4 main areas to cover, feature phones, smart phones with low level support, smart phones and tablets. The primary tablet market will be 7-inch devices up to...
February 2012
17 posts
5 tags
Android's Ugly Family
What Android will sometimes present, is a bug you simply cannot explain. This is one of those bugs that you have tested on every version of Android, but only shows on one. In our case, Android 2.1 shows it annoying side by creating a bug that continues to overlay a text field once submitted.
How can you determine if this is a bug with your code, or a bug with the OS, or a bug with the...
Internet explorer on Windows Phone 7
Where the hell is the forward button in the browser Microsoft?????
1 tag
Logical Multi-App-Tasking
Here is what happens on a daily basis, you are out and about, snap a picture and want to share it, enter the world of multi-app-tasking through apps.
Step 1
What we are going to do is take a picture, then post to tumblr, but first we go to gallery to check and edit the shot, it is good, so i click the Android share button. Down drops a list of apps that are happy to share my picture and blog,...
Blackberry 7 is helpful?
Today I discovered a very useful tool in the browser of BBOS 7, a remote debugger.
What RIM have done, is allow your phone to be visible on the network and then connect to it through a browser, once there, it displayed pages that are loaded on your phone. Each page can then be viewed as you normally would, using the console and CSS tabs in dev tools to identify issues.
Although you can use...
Desktop browsers
While the browser hasn’t changed in 2 years on android 2.1, desktop browsers move at an incredible pace. The 2 big examples are chrome and Firefox, moving from version 4 to 9 in 1 year. Both use auto updating, so the user will always have the newest version, but you cant assume everyone is.
The only real way to test is to ensure you have the current version and a version from around 3...
IOS options
Get used to these words, clear cookies and cache. Most of the time, this is the reason you aren’t looking at the latest build. So you would think in this day and age that Apple would give you the option to clear each individually, not on iOS 5.
You get a single button that just screws around with your testing, especially of you just want to clear the cache. What I want to see from Apple...
Accessibilty or lack there of
So when testing a major website, we should take more than a minute to think about those who are less able that most. For that reason, accessibility testing is an important part of a project.
The major issue is that our friend, Android, has a cluster fuck of support between versions, but wait, the browser is also going to need testing too. The OS is the first hurdle, android by default...
Created to fail
It would simpler to just call them the OS’s in training. Windows phone 7.5 feels like the developers got to a point and stopped. It lacks more support than it has, it is like the dumb kid in the classroom, all dressed up, but fairly unresponsive.
The next OS that should be forgotten is android 2.1, not only is it terrible to use, the browser is like pastry on valentines day…..half baked. One of...
