The digital domain of Rick Curran
I have finally got myself a GoPro! This is a couple of test clips with footage shot in 720p 120fps mode on the GoPro Hero 3, then slowed down further in After Effects CS6 using Timestretch and Timewarp.
A bit glitchy due to the flickering from light behind it, I’ll try this again in bright daylight and compare results.
I wrote about BrowserLab here on Suburbia back when it launched in 2009, at the time it was one of very few web apps that let you preview websites in different browser / OS combinations. But things have moved on a lot since then with new services such as BrowserStack and Sauce which offer the much more compelling feature-set of being able to use live virtual machines accessed through your browser in order to use and test sites rather than just static screenshots.
BrowserLab has languished a bit for a while with very few desktop browser options and nothing to offer in the increasingly important areas of mobile and tablet device testing, in light of this Adobe seems to have decided that it’s better to kill it off instead of languish any further. Although some may be disappointed in this decision I had already ‘jumped ship’ and started using BrowserStack instead (as per my recent post) so it doesn’t affect my own workflow.
One bit of good news for those who enjoyed BrowserLab is that Sauce are offering a deal to BrowserLab users, for the next 30 days you can signup and get 10 free hours of testing, so go sign up for Sauce here and use ‘adobe’ as the promo code to get that offer.
I’ve just signed up for this myself and I’m going to try it out and see how it compares to BrowserStack, I can see a few differences between the two services already but I’m keen to see how the performance compares.
I made this as a little experiment in self-filming with my iPhone, there was no-one else at my local skatepark late one night.
I thought it would be fun to try a multi-angle shoot of a rolling carve line around the park.
Like many web design / developers I’ve made use of virtualisation applications like VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion for Mac in order to test websites in the various versions of Internet Explorer. Using these apps requires buying the relevant Windows licences for the various virtual machines and also the overhead of keeping these current with the latest OS updates and browser / plugin updates too.
However, I recently did a fresh install of OSX on my Mac and decided just to remove all of the virtual machines due to the amount of space they used and had every intention of installing them all fresh and continuing to work that way. But due to project demands at work I had no time to do it and decided to look around for alternative ways to do some testing as I needed to do it for a project. I had previously used Adobe’s BrowserLab tool for quick static testing for layout issues in browsers but I needed something that let me browse sites and actually interact with the pages, and that’s where BrowserStack fits the bill perfectly.
BrowserStack lets you connect to browsers running in virtual machines but directly through your browser, a bit like connecting to a machine via remote desktop. There are basically three steps to testing a site:
1.) Select the OS version you want:
2.) Choose from the available web browsers from that platform:
3.) Enter the url of the site you want to test and hit the "Start testing" button:
The connection is then made to the virtual machine and rendered via the Flash plugin in your browser allowing you to interact with the site remotely, you can then easily choose from different OS and / or browser versions and then hit the "Update" button in the left hand menu and it will automatically grab the current url you are browsing and open that using your desired selection.
This how the site is viewed within BrowserStack:
Overall it’s just a really easy to use system and lets you switch between different OS / browser variations much more quickly and with much less system overhead than using locally installed virtual machines.
It’s worth weighing up and pointing out some of the pros and cons of BrowserStack, there are few issues that might still cause you to choose running local virtual machines instead:
So, that’s a basic overview of BrowserStack, but the best thing to do of course is try it yourself using the free trial which gives you 30 minutes (non-consecutive) to try out the full system.
It doesn’t take a genius to note that mobile devices are pretty much overtaking the web, and that a huge amount of people – the majority depending on the statistics you pay attention to – are accessing the web via a mobile device such as an iPhone, iPad or other smartphone / tablet.
As such there has been a huge buzz about responsive design and how to make sites adapt well between a range of screen sizes and resolutions, and moving away from the concept of a fixed size of screen such as the ubiquitous 960 pixel grid framework. One of the biggest challenges in this new era of web design and development has been the lack of good tools to aid you in the process of creating responsive, adaptive websites.
The ability to work in code and create media queries to handle various device widths and related styles has been possible for a while, but it can be a bit mind-melting trying to keep track of all of this and to test as you work through the development process. Fortunately we are now beginning to see a range of tools to help you develop responsive sites, one of the most recent being Adobe’s new Edge Reflow tool which is an app that lets you visually adjust the viewport and tweak the CSS of various media queries. It’s a simple, focused app that lets you resize the viewport and tweak the styles as you go. At the time of writing it hasn’t been released yet but when I get a chance I will definitely be checking it out and writing something about it.
Another challenge with working with mobile devices is that you really need to test on actual mobile devices to get an understanding of the true behaviour of them. Although you can set the width of your desktop browser to be the same as that of an iPhone it won’t necessarily behave exactly the same way due to the differences in the way the browsers handle CSS or JavaScript.
One of the difficulties in testing on devices themselves is that it’s not very easy to debug when things don’t work as expected. On a desktop browser such as Safari you can use the Web Inspector to see the live code as you interact with it and also see any JavaScript errors that are triggered, but on a mobile browser there is often little available to help you detect the errors.
Thankfully there are now tools being developed to allow remote access to the code running on the device itself, Adobe developed a tool codenamed ‘Shadow’ (now formally released as Edge Inspect) which works by providing apps for various mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets.
With these apps installed on your devices you then run a desktop app on your computer as well as an extension in Google Chrome. You can then view websites in Chrome and they will be simultaneously displayed on the mobile devices running the apps, but the key feature is that you can remotely inspect the HTML, CSS and JavaScript running in the app on those devices. A really excellent tool.
Adobe Edge Inspect (formerly Shadow) is a great tool, but what if, like me, you prefer to work in desktop Safari as your main browser and don’t want to or can’t use Chrome to test sites? In case anyone thinks this is just down to a matter of personal preference of browser I can give a legitimate example of why having to use Chrome can be a problem – Chrome’s in-built support for Flash gets in the way of testing content that is intended as fallback or alternative content on the desktop.
Fortunately the recent release of iOS6 offers a new feature that enables remote web inspection of mobile Safari on iPhone or iPad.
To make use of it you need to go into the ‘Settings’ app on your iOS device, and drill down into ‘Safari->Advanced’ where you’ll find a new toggle button for ‘Web inspector’, (this replaces the old ‘Debug’ option in mobile Safari which really offered little functionality).
Switch this on and you’ll see a small paragraph of text appearing which explains that you need to connect your device to your computer with a cable for this feature to work.
Once you’ve enabled Web Inspector on your iOS device(s) then you should find them listed in the Develop menu in Safari on your computer, it should looks something like this:
You can select the device and then it opens up a menu showing the available applications that web inspector can open. Note that you need to have mobile Safari open on your iOS device for any sites to be listed in the menu, if they’re not open then you’ll get a message saying ‘No Inspectable Applications’.
Once you select a site from the menu then the familiar Web Inspector window in Safari on your computer will open, the difference is that you are seeing the HTML, CSS and JavaScript from your iOS device. You can then browse around and interact with the site on your iOS device and inspect all of the changes occurring right in Web Inspector. Here’s a view of the HTML from a site on my iPhone:
Just as with the ‘regular’ web inspector you can interact, view and update HTML and CSS and then see these temporary tweaks appear right on your iOS device. The main benefit in debugging for me has been in dealing with JavaScript / jQuery code, I can make use of console.log messages and debug via the console just as I would when working on my computer:
In a recent jQuery mobile based site I was developing I encountered code that was failing in mobile Safari but working fine in Safari on my Mac – exactly the kind of situation I mentioned earlier in this article where code is handled differently in mobile Safari. But thanks to this new remote web inspector functionality I was able to easily add some console messages and figure out what was going on and adjust the code to work around the problem.
iOS6’s remote web inspection functionality is definitely a huge improvement if you are making sites that you need to test on iOS devices. With the increase in Android-based devices such as Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets you will of course need to test on other devices besides iPhones and iPads. So tools like Adobe’s Edge Inspect are definitely something you will need to make use of too for testing across the various platforms and devices, but the simplicity of this iOS-specific testing workflow is very easy to set up and work with. A definite two-thumbs up from me!
I’m going to take a look at some of the other tools available to aid in the contemporary web development workflow of responsive, mobile-friendly design and write some more posts about them soon. In particular an updated look at Adobe’s Edge Animate tool and also a look at the Edge Reflow tool once it has been released.
Along with a gazillion other people around the Globe I upgraded my iPhone to the new iOS 6 software that just came out, everything worked fine during the upgrade but afterwards both myself and my work colleague found that our iPhone voicemail no longer worked.
In this case my iPhone is on the UK’s Orange network (soon to be known as EE) which along with every other carrier apart from O2 doesn’t give you the nice Visual Voicemail the way that Apple intended. Instead voicemail is accessed just like any other mobile phone since the 1990’s by pressing a voicemail button which then dials a number and you then access the voicemail by pressing numbers on the keypad.
However, I couldn’t even get that far, tapping the voicemail button just came up with an error messaging saying that voicemail was not configured and to get in touch with the phone company (or words to that effect). I looked up some support forums for Orange and on the Apple site but didn’t find anything recent relating to iOS6 but I did come up with something from a while ago which seems to have done the trick!
First you need to find out what the actual number is that you need to call to access voicemail, for Orange this is simply ‘123’. The next and final step is to enter the following sequence into the phone dialer on your iPhone but making sure to substitute the ‘123’ in my example for whatever the number is for your phone service’s voicemail:
**5005*86*123#
Just enter that and hit dial, the screen should flash quickly and after that your voicemail should now be working! If it doesn’t then you’re probably best either contacting your phone operator or visiting an Apple Store. But hopefully it will fix it!
Bonus News – Visual Voicemail coming to EE:
A bonus bit of news I discovered whilst I was googling for a solution is that apparently EE (according to their Twitter account) are going to add visual voicemail to their service in the new year, so Orange and T-Mobile customers should hopefully get that on their iPhones in future.
I wrote a post "My thoughts on Adobe Edge" back in August last year which looked at Edge Preview 1 where I was mainly interested in seeing how the output of Edge compared with Flash in capability, size and efficiency.
Since then Adobe have been regularly updating the Preview releases for Edge and have just released Adobe Edge Preview 5, since the initial Preview 1 release – which was pretty bare bones in regard to functionality – they have added a lot of new functionality.
In particular two things I’m pleased to see in Preview 5 are "Publish to Web" which brings code minification and "Down-level Stage for non-HTML5 Browsers" which provides a way to set fallback content for non-HTML5 browsers:
It’s good to see the minification capabilities added as this definitely helps deal with the size issue that I highlighted in my Preview 1 post. I think there’s probably still a load of work to do in minimising file sizes as this is especially important for mobile devices.
I’m keen to see what new features are added in future Preview releases, one issue is in regard to responsive web layouts and how content created in Edge can possibly adapt to the dimensions of the device / browser window that it is viewed in, again for mobile access this is very important.
One other feature that would be very good is some way to reproduce the masking capabilities that is possible in Flash, in particular the ability to apply a non-square mask over some content. It is possible to clip content but this uses rectangular clipping by limiting the overflow of a containing div to be hidden. I can’t see how non-square cropping would be possible with the limitations of current CSS3 capabilities, I’d happily be proven wrong on this though.
Here’s a preview video published on Adobe TV which introduces the updated features in Beta 5:
I’ve written quite a few posts about the various products that the guys over at Shedworx develop and that have been useful to me whilst working with video (AVCHD video in particular!). They’ve written a couple of articles which are great primers for people new to working with audio and video.
The articles explain the various aspects of audio and video such as Codecs and Bit Rates and are well worth reading, especially if you’ve never given much consideration to the output of your video or audio and have just gone for defaults in apps such as iMovie etc. Even if you’ve been working in these areas and have a good knowledge of this stuff they’re still worth a read.
I’ve been getting more and more bugged by people referring to the next iPhone as being the "iPhone 5", so I thought I’d make this simple graphic to explain why numerically it makes no sense for the next iPhone to be referred to as number 5!
You can download a 300dpi A4 sized version from this link if you want to print your own out and annoy inform any of your co-workers / friends / family / bloggers / podcasters when they start saying "what will the iPhone 5 be like?"…
This free app from the guys at Shedworx has worked out pretty handily for me just recently as it’s got one capability that I’ve needed just recently. I needed to convert downloaded FLV files from archived UStream recordings and extract the audio out of it in order to make a podcast file.
UStream FLV file conversion is definitely a really handy feature, dealing with FLV files can be a bit problematic at times as not many apps will let you open them and do much with them. Quicktime on Mac doesn’t handle them by default so unless you install something like Perian you can’t really play them back without using a third party app like VLC.
The Smart Converter interface with the various formats for conversion.
Once the app is open you can drag and drop the video file you want to convert onto the Smart Converter window. The next step is to choose the conversion format, you can pick from presets for iPad, iPhone, AppleTV and Android devices.
In my case though to convert into an audio file I select from the ‘Other’ drop-down menu and chose the MP3 option from the list of options (but there are also presets for PSP, Playstation, XBox, Windows formats and others to choose from too).
After choosing the format you just hit the big ‘Convert’ button and wait for it to do its thing! It’s a pretty simple to use app so there’s not really any more to it, it’s worked really well for this workflow of converting FLV files. The only real limitation being that you can only convert one a file at a time but as I’m only doing one file every so often that’s not been a problem for me. If you really need batch conversion and don’t mind spending $9.99 / £6.99 then you can get Smart Converter Pro which adds batch conversion to the app though.