Two New Ways to Test Mobile Devices

Two novel ways to test mobile devices came to my attention today.  This has traditionally been a sticky area for developers as you could not exactly point the device to "localhost" and hack away.

xip.io is a service from 37Signals, who bring us Ruby on Rails-based products like Basecamp.  At a glance, it's somewhat simple, but pretty cool.  You can use the service to point your mobile device towards a local development server, passing through a public DNS server. Be sure to use your internal LAN address (not necessarily the one the public internet sees).

Adobe Shadow is a different take.  This Adobe Labs project essentially allows you to mirror your desktop on a mobile device via a small application installed on each.  With it, you can synchronously browse your site, viewing both the desktop and mobile experiences.