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Having mailer previews built in is pretty awesome. I pretty much use a gem for that on every project nowadays.

The variants thing is interesting ... I'm assuming its an alternative to rendering a responsive/mobile-first view (on a view-by-view basis). I'm sure there are plenty of use-cases but I don't like the prospect of having to update yet-another-set-of-layouts-and-views.

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Responsive views only go so far. Trying to shrink an app designed for a desktop browser down to a 4" phone is a fool's errand. Much easier to go with different templates in that case.

I guess you can mix responsive layouts with variant templates anyway, right? Just place your responsive markup in a partial and reference it in.

> Trying to shrink an app designed for a desktop browser down to a 4" phone is a fool's errand

That's why, when you design a responsive website, you're supposed to think / work out mobile first.

Hoping to detect all mobile devices out there based on their http request is no wiser.

You end up with a LOT of hidden or visible markup, redundant on both mobile and desktop.

After working on responsive websites for about 2 years now, I feel that variants is the way to go with Mobile designs.

You flesh out something lightweight for mobile and then another for tablet + desktop + whatever.

Otherwise your mobile display is needlessly large.

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