Adobe Edge Inspect
Edge Inspect is an excellent application for web developers and designers alike who need to preview their content across multiple mobile devices. It makes a once manual and fairly painful process relatively quick and seamless. Its most notable features include the ability to navigate a the web from one machine with many mobile devices following, snapping mobile screenshots and inspecting the code on mobile screens. All of these features combined end up saving much valuable product design time.
Features
Multi-Device Testing
Edge works by pairing multiple devices (currently only iOS and Android are supported) with a computer over your WiFi network. Once connected, you simply browse the web using the computer, as the *Leading* device, and all of the connected mobile devices, or the *Following* devices, follow along!Remote inspection
Additionally, you can target a specific device for Remote Inspection using familiar in-browser development tools, like Firebug or inspect element in Chrome. Here you're able to make changes to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the in-device browser will update instantly. Edge Inspect uses a hosted weinre server on Adobe.com to perform this automagically. It's really seamless and comparable to desktop code inspection.Screenshots
Grab screenshots from all your connected devices with accompanying meta data and easily save them to the leading device. Screenshots are transferred to your computer, to a folder you can specify.Setting it all up
The initial setup is a bit kludgey, with room for improvement, but honestly well worth it in the end. You need to be browsing in Google Chrome, using a Chrome extension and also be running the Adobe Edge desktop application. This sounds more complex than it needs to be, I agree with you there!
Connecting each mobile device is a manual process as well, requiring you to key in a generated pin for each device. Thankfully once you've connected a device to the Leading computer once, reopening it during subsequent tests is fairly painless.
Room For Improvement
As I just stated, there is certainly some room for improvement. First and foremost, I'd like to see shared cookies somehow enabled in this software. Far from an easy task, but a crucial one all the same for such a testing framework. As it stands today you're unable to login to a site with the leading device and have the followers share credentials and go through that type of portal along with you. This really breaks down an otherwise smooth flow, requiring manual sign in using each device.
Additionally, the initial setup process lacks finesse. It would be interesting to see some experimentation from Adobe in making this process less manual, with RFID, bluetooth or at the very least some fugly QR codes.
That's all I have to say about that.
Happy testing!