There are many times when you finish a website with a big smile, only to find out that your customer does not share your enthusiasm. In fact more times than not customers ask for a series of changes to the original designs. From minor visual changes like the colour of buttons to the creation of new screens, customers always find something to add or change.

The number one reason why customers ask for corrections at the end of a project is the lack of communication with the design team early on. Wouldn’t it be great if you could show your customer how your designs look in mobile devices, before you get to the coding phase ?

This is exactly what ‘Images’ allows you to do. Simply drag and drop your mobile designs to MobileTest.me and share the previews with your customers. MobileTest will resize your images accordingly and show you how your project will look in various devices when it’s finished.

We have also added the new keyboard shortcuts N & M which allow you to cycle through your uploaded images. This way you can preview and showcase an entire project before you write a single line of code.

1. Going official

After many months of development and testing we are proud to announce that we have now officially released MobileTest.me as a product, therefore ending the beta period. After creating an account you are free to try out the full version for a 30 day trial. After your trial ends we are asking for a monthly payment of $9.99.

2. Going responsive & super fast

Although it makes little sense to use MobileTest.me from a mobile device we could not bear the thought of our website not having a mobile version. Therefore we went through the process of re-designing and re-coding the entire website using responsive techniques. The result is a website that looks and works exactly the same way as before on the desktop and now also looks amazing on tablets and smartphones.

We used Foundation 5 to speed up the process and we are extremely happy with the results. During the process we also took the time to clean up the code and optimise the pages for performance. Pages now load faster than a cheetah. On the first visit the home page loads in about 4 seconds. On repeated visits it loads in an astonishing 1.5 second.

3. Sign up with Google or Facebook

Everybody hates remembering (and forgetting) passwords and so do we. That’s why we added the option of creating an account or logging in using Google or Facebook. And just so you don’t lose your favourite devices and recent tests, we made the login system automatically link your account if your email is the same. If you used your email@gmail.com to login before, you can now use the social login buttons. If they are linked to an account with the same email you will get access to your old beloved account.

4. Help pages for testing like a boss

We have created a help system in the pro version with answers to all the things you need to know to be an expert user of MobileTest.me. How do I add a device to favourites? What are emulation modes? Anytime you need answers just click ‘Help’ on the top right corner.

We just uploaded “Release 10” in our servers.

• It includes many stability fixes for mobile emulation mode.
  A lot of sites that had issues with cross-domain CSS & Javascript now work like a charm.
• Also we added many new devices including the much anticipated new iPhone 6 & the iPhone 6 plus.
• The orientation and emulation buttons now look more like buttons making them easier to spot for new users.
• As many sites took a long time to load we added a loader to let you know that emulation is working in the background while you wait.
• We have upgraded the hardware of our servers to improve loading times and handle many concurrent users during peak times.

You can now use keyboard shortcuts.

• Use right and left arrow keys to switch to next/previous device in group.
• Use up/down arrows to switch between landscape & portrait orientation.
• Use the ‘E’ key to switch emulation mode between mobile & responsive.

For the next release we are focused on further improving performance in mobile emulation. Our short term goal is to drop long loading times to 20% of current times.
We are also creating a showcase tool, which you will be able to use to show your customers how their website looks in many different devices at a glance.

Enjoy the new release everyone.
Happy testing

We just uploaded “Release 9” to our servers. Here’s all the great new goodies it includes.

Pro Version

• Greatly improved advanced emulation for websites which use redirects to point to a mobile version
• Access to Beta is now open. No invite required.
• When clicking on the address bar, text is automatically selected
• Interface improvements to the feedback functionality
• Switch device arrows will not be shown when there is only one device in group

Free Version

• Fixed a bug which was causing share links to point to wrong tests
• Interface improvements to the “share this link” box

Other news

• Launched the MobileTest.me blog
• Lots of minor fixes and interface improvements

We hope you enjoy the new release. Be sure to give us your feedback about all the things that can make MobileTest.me even better.

Happy Testing!

One of the most common elements we see in web software, is the timezone selector. Although simple enough as a concept, it is a frequent source of frustration for many users, especially on mobile.

In this example we can see the “Notification settings” page for Evernote’s iOS app. We can easily guess that this page was made for the desktop web version of Evernote and was used in the mobile app without any further testing. The problem with this selector is that there is simply not enough space to display all text. This leads to users being unable to select their timezone, which in turn leads to  notifications being deferred, which defeats the purpose of this functionality.

The simplest solution to this problem would be to use shorter text for the selector. For example “Athens UTC +3” etc. This would make the selector usable both for the mobile and desktop versions of this page.

Yet we can take this one step further and create an even better timezone selector by using the <optgroup> element. This would allow us to group options in our <select> element. With this approach we can provide an easy way for users to narrow down their location and at the same time still use the short text we mentioned earlier.

<select>

 <optgroup label="Western Europe">

  <option value="london">London UTC +1</option>

  <option value="paris">Paris UTC +2</option>

 </optgroup>

 <optgroup label="Eastern Europe">

  <option value="athens">Athens UTC +3</option>

  <option value="moscow">Moscow UTC +4</option>

 </optgroup>

</select>