Adobe launches Shadow, a new toolkit for mobile developers

The way to connect all devices is pretty polished, although the install is not terribly clear. You need to install a local app on your dev machine (presumably hosting weinre), as well as a chrome extension. Then you install the Shadow apps on all your devices. Once that's done, connecting devices works pretty well.

On the other hand it's for pure web browsing (the chrome extension is to follow you around in chrome). So you obviously can't use it to debug a hybrid app (e.g. PhoneGap). You can do that with a pure weinre.

Second, my devices sometimes lose track of where I am. This may or may not be because of the next point.

Third, the devices following you around is entirely url-based. In other words, it doesn't reproduce browser events (e.g. clicks, form submits, etc.), it simply reloads the page completely when the url changes. I'm not saying it should: desktop and mobile support different sets of events. However this reduces its usefulness with single page load apps.

I almost mentioned ajax form submits as a case where its usefulness is reduced. But it occurred to me that you'd probably rather enter your stuff manually on every device anyway. This, paired with the fact that Shadow doesn't try to keep all device in sync when you click around on the devices (it only follows your chrome browser), actually makes it possible for one to test these kinds of interactions.

With that said, I'll still keep an eye on this tool. I think it's pretty promising.

Interesting side note: it's apparently using weinre[2] as the remote inspector.

[1] Download from here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/shadow.html

[2] http://phonegap.github.com/weinre/

Edit: as I understand, the limitations come from weinre because it's JavaScript based on the client side.

... tied up with selenium or similar to drive more complex interactions on my desktop browser & have them mirrored by pushing javascript to my phone, could make this a very powerful change.

edit: misread istvanp