We Keep Coding

Which mobile device emulators do you use to test mobile development?

I was wondering what emulators everyone uses to test your mobile development, want to make sure I'm using the most accurate emulators/simulators.
I currently use the Electric Mobile Simulator from electric plum for iPad and iPhone simulation as well as Opera Mini and Mobile emulators. I have downloaded the Android SDK but have trouble making this work so am very dubious about the results I see on this.
I understand that using a real device to test my pages will merit the best results but Id also likes to have a decent emulator pack on my desktop just to give me a rough guide of how the development process is progressing.
All suggestions and feedback welcomed
Kyle

Get as many real devices as possible. Then, to ease the pain for mobile web development, hack something together like Shim: https://github.com/marstall/shim to coordinate all your browsing.

I use Opera Mobile Emulator with Opera Dragonfly as a debugging tool, which makes styling and scripting pretty easy 90% of the way. If running Opera (Mobile & Mini), you can connect your real devices to the developer tools window of Dragonfly - that's a great way to effectively scan your code.
The current commercial version of Electric Mobile Simulator states to render just as iOS. It actually comes very close. It basically is a Chrome fork - which works, because both Chrome and Safari are Webkit browsers. However, rendering pages that use flash fallbacks and other trickery might display differently on the simulator. EMS has built-in developer tools, which helps a lot finding those crummy css bugs. I use this tool a lot.
There was a free version of Electric Mobile Simulator, however it rendered most of the content equating to the operating system's browser (Can't find the version now however).
Android SDK is a giant. I used it before, and I doubt that it can offer you anything you couldn't achieve with Opera Mobile Emulator or Electric MS. It can be sluggish, slow responding - depending on the performance of your machine. However, simulating a device in Android SDK brings you very close to the real deal.
But in the end, you definitely need to test on real devices. Not all bugs show in simulators, also you can't precisely simulate touch events. We started collecting used mobile devices (iPhone3, iPad1, older Samsung models and so on); and will continue doing so.
Summary: Nothing replaces testing mobile sites on real devices, but emulators can speed up development from the project's start until the middle of beta stage.

You could also use DeviceAnywhere. With DA you test on real devices.

Is there an equivilent of jQTouch that covers iPhone, Android, WebOS and Blackberry OS?

I am about to start writing a web app for the latest smartphones using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. I don’t need a framework so much as a library like jQuery.
I looked at jQTouch which is great for iPhone and apparently has support coming for Android too but I am looking to cover Blackberry device Software v4.6 upwards and WebOS 5 as well.
Does anyone have any ideas of alternatives to jQTouch or experience using jQTouch with Android's native browser, Blackberry's browser or WebOS native browser?

Well you probably have to use jQuery. In the beginning of October, the jQuery community will release a jQuery Mobile Version, where you can use all the advantages of jQuery within almost every mobile browser.
Check their site out: http://jquerymobile.com/

Sencha Touch is a possible alternative, but I have no idea how well it works on BB and WebOS. I'm afraid that you won't find something that works well with BB, since they have switched to a Webkit based browser only recently.

I did a project for Android and iPhone using jQTouch. There were times when I had to fiddle with the code to get it working correctly but as a whole I found that almost everything worked on iPhone and Android. Where I started having problems was that the Android browser doesn't have nearly as much support for CSS3/HTML5 (especially with animations) and the app ran much slower on android as the browser doesn't have hardware accelerated graphics. This was a while ago so hopefully it has matured a bit now.

PhoneGap seems to be a reasonable cross-platform framework that supports encapsulating web app type development into an iPhone/iOS app, as well seeming to support some of the other platforms you asked about (but I have tried it on those).
http://www.phonegap.com/

Javascript differences between Mobile Safari and Safari on Mac?

Hey this question is pretty general, but I'm wondering what the Javascript differences are in Mobile Safari and Safari for Mac.
I was under the impression that from a Javascript perspective they are the same, with only some differences in CSS/rendering. But I am experiencing a number of Javascript errors in Mobile Safari that don't exist in regular Safari on Mac.
Basically a number of calls to certain jQuery plugins are returning undefined values (according to the developer debugger in Mobile Safari).
The website that I'm experiencing these issues on has a very lousy front end that is riddled with validation errors, lousy JS and has an enormous amount of CSS attached. I have no doubt that this issue lies somewhere in this code, and I've never experienced issues like this before.
I'm just having trouble honing in on the problem, so any insight/links as to the general differences in Javascript engines would be much appreciated.

Javascript itself, the core language, is no different. There are a few significant differences in the DOM that appear undocumented, but mostly it is all the same. Here you can see some differences in events that you can handle.
The DOM differences I noticed had to do with measuring elements. For example getClientRects, at least for a Selection or Range, was not available. There are probably other things.

Before I add my two cents about differences in Safari depending on environment or build: the list of possible environments for Safari is bigger than just iPod, iPhone, iMac.
I am also dealing with: Safari for Windows (desktop) and Mobile Safari in iOS Simulator on iMac.
My jQueryMobile + PhoneGap app works nicely in Safari for Windows (desktop) and Safari on iMac, but it has the following problems in Safari on iOS Simulator on iMac Snow Leopard with XCode 3.x:
Google Analytics gets a "whitelist rejection" in iOS simulator.
My app hangs early on in the user's setup process through another problem
That other problem could be any of:
tags placed after element may not be loading
properly
calls to localDb may not be coming through
jQuery's events (pageinit,click,etc) may not come though in the same way

Pocket IE onmousedown onmousemove onmouseup?

I have a control which I wrote for capturing signatures on a web page, by using onmousedown, onmousemove and onmouseup on a div to track the mouse, and capture points comprising a signature.
Now we need this to work on Windows Mobile 6.5 powered devices... but it seems that the div element does not support the mouse events in Pocket IE, which would seem to be supported by this blog.
But according to MSDN, the WinCE (which WinMo/PPC is based off of) version of IE does support these mouse events for some unknown list of elements.
So can anyone tell me, are there any elements: img, a, span or whatever that support onmouse[down|move|up] in WinMo 6.5 Pocket IE?
Thanks!
If not, anyone have any other ideas for capturing a signature on a web page in Pocket IE?

This is apparently not possible; and likely never will be now that MS has essentially EOLd WinMo in favor of the WinPhone OS.

Correspondence with Microsoft via the phasing out of WinMo...
My Email to Microsoft
Hello Soma,
I have 2 questions for your expertise, regarding Windows Mobile's future in development.
First, is there any idea when an SDK for WinMo 6.x will come out for VS2010? We do a lot of development for handheld barcode scanners from Honeywell/Handheld and Motorola/Symbol, which will likely be staying with 6.x for a while, and I really would like to be able to get rid of VS2008 on my machine.
And second, what does WinMo 7, and the whole app-marketplace-model of development mean for these kinds of developments? If we are writing an app for a single client, that goes on industrial-type hardware, like these barcode scanners, we would not want to put these on the marketplace, so how would we develop for WinMo7 for ISV work for industrial clients?
Thanks, and have a good day!
Microsoft's Email to Me
Hi,
Unfortunately there are no current plans for VS2010 to support WinMo 6.x. Vs2010 is exclusively targeting Windows Phone 7 as was announced recently at MIX conference and other related communications. We are recommending developers to continue using VS2008 for WinMo 6.x and Vs2008 does work side by side with VS2010.
I have copied Charlie from our Windows Phone 7 team and he can further elaborate on this and your second question related to the marketplace.
Thanks,
Sudeep Bharati
sudeepb#microsoft.com

What's the best way to write JavaScript/Ruby applications on Windows Mobile device?

I recently bought a Windows Mobile device and since I'm a developer I want to use it as a development platform. Yes, it's not supposed to be used like that but it's always with me and my laptop isn't. I know cke is a good editor for code but how can I run JavaScript/Ruby code without too much of a headache?
I probably could write a web application, send code to it and get the results back but maybe there's better solutions?

There is a possibility to run Ruby on Windows Mobile
Check this article for steps: Human vs Machine
Javascript is bit crippled on Windows Mobile.
Follow up the discussions here: Windows Mobile IE Team Blog
Hopefully the next version if Pocket Internet Explorer supports better!

I'm not sure if you're interested, but there's only a port of Python for CE.
http://pythonce.sourceforge.net/

You can also use etcl from Evolane (http://www.evolane.com/software/etcl).
It comes with console.

This is n old port of Ruby to WinCE, but from what I've read it doesn't work all that well - who knows, give it a try, YMMV
http://uema2.s8.xrea.com/ruby-mswince/
As for Javascript, WinMo devices have Pocket Internet Explorer - it isn't very good, but runs some Javascript. If you want something that is a bit closer to a desktop you could install Opera.

I've had a Windows Mobile phone for just over a month and would also like to run code on it. Unfortunately it's such a limited platform with hardly any community support. It seems to me that the only decent choices are Python, NSBASIC and PPL
For Javascript, you'll be better off using Opera, opposed to Pocket Internet Explorer.
As for cke, I found CEdit a more stable editor but you do have to pay for it. Though I don't think there is any editor that does syntax highlighting for Ruby on Window Mobile.

Rhomobile's open source framework Rhodes (www.rhomobile.com) works great on Windows Mobile.