Setting up Adobe Shadow
In the wonderful world of responsive web design, the walls have truly been broken down in terms of both who can access the web, and what they access the web on. The multitude of different mobile devices, tablet sizes, differing laptop form factors, and differing desktop screen sizes means that testing has required more browsers on more devices to be supported, simply because no assumptions can be made anymore about what your audience is accessing your web application on. In an effort to alleviate the pain of testing a website on several mobile devices separately, Adobe Shadow has entered the fray.
As part of a test suite at work, the was a necessity to include iPhone, iPad and Android device support. With another key player in automated browser testing not fully supporting mobile devices yet, I decided to have a go at setting up Adobe Shadow on the mobile devices in the test suite (it should be noted that it is still in beta at the time of writing).
As per the instruction page on the Adobe Shadow site, I downloaded the Shadow helper application, Chrome extension and then installed these on an iMac that's on the same wireless network as the mobile devices. Lastly, I installed the Adobe Shadow app on each mobile device (by navigating to the AppStore equivalent for each of the supported mobile devices):
- Adobe Shadow for iPhone/iPad
- Adobe Shadow for Android
- Adobe Shadow for Kindle Fire