Meanwhile development of a true iDevice emulator is underway. Unlike XCode's iDevice simulator (it compiles the dev app for the host architecture [x86/x86-64]), this emulator is based off of ARM QEMU with lots of hard work going into emulating the iPhone's hardware. It directly emulates stock iOSes/apps.<p>Project page:
<a href="http://www.iemu.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.iemu.org</a><p>Github:
<a href="https://github.com/cmwdotme/QEMU-s5l89xx-port" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cmwdotme/QEMU-s5l89xx-port</a><p>Screenshots:
<a href="http://www.cmw.me/lcdworking.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.cmw.me/lcdworking.png</a>
<a href="http://www.cmw.me/ichargetoo.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.cmw.me/ichargetoo.png</a>
<a href="http://www.iemu.org/oibiemu.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.iemu.org/oibiemu.png</a><p>Author's Twitter:
<a href="http://twitter.com/cmwdotme" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/cmwdotme</a>
Aw, TechCrunch. Why do you do it?<p>These guys put together a cool little simulator and you use it <i>embed a single app into your article</i>, thus forcing all 100k visitors to your site to DOS the thing??? Why not link to the site and let people hit it on their own, thus spreading the load out to a few different apps and giving the server a chance to handle your traffic?<p>I feel for these guys because TechCrunch did the same thing to us when they reviewed Twiddla. They linked a single meeting room, thus essentially sending 10000 people into one conference call. "wow, this is crowded." "who changed the page?" "why did my drawing get erased?"<p>It was a full hour of chaos before we noticed what they'd done and pushed a new build to specifically redirect traffic from that meeting to the homepage. Not that TC traffic is particularly useful in terms of long term customers, but guys, at least try to think about what will actually happen if you deep link stuff like that.
Amazon is doing some interesting work to drive an EC2 hosted Android simulator with a Flash front-end, letting to you test drive apps in the browser.<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/mobile/amazons-testdrive-is-the-real-strength-of-appstore/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/mobile/amazons-testdrive-is-the-real-stren...</a><p>That being said, it is ridiculous that there is no built in way to take screens of an app on an Android phone (like the power + home iOS combo). Since Android has the concept of a secure canvas (e.g.sensitive content), this should be stock.<p>Lack of easy screenshots makes it harder for normal users to blog about and help review and promote an Android app.
This is very cool. I'd love to read more about how it works. I think they're running a dedicated iOS simulator for each app and streaming the user input/video output via Flash. Even their $60/mo plan has a limit of 10 simultaneous viewers, so I imagine it's pretty taxing on their hardware.<p>They must be capturing the output at some deeper layer though since OpenGL doesn't render (but it does run).
Since you send them a copy of your iPhone simulator code, they must be running this on some kind of Mac OS X system, and giving you VNC-style access to the app.<p>Kinda dodgy.
I have needed this product for months now to demo my company's app for prospective buyers. This will allow our technical sales force (who are on PC's) to share this via GoToMeeting with prospects (we're a B2B in a very relationship-driven industry).
The idea is great but unfortunately the technology behind it is limiting. Since their highest pricing plan only allows for 10 simultaneous viewers it's not realistic option to embed it in a popular blog as a demo.