Anyone who designs and builds websites or mobile apps will have found themselves having to ensure their work is compatible with an ever expanding number of devices over the last few years, and it’s only going to keep expanding.
There are a number of different ways of testing compatibility on different devices, from just testing on a desktop and resizing your browser (not recommended) to software emulators, to buying real devices
We’re a firm believer in testing on real devices. Not because emulators don’t work, but because you only get the full experience when testing on a real device: Are the colours bright enough on an iPad in sunlight, are the buttons too small for my fat fingers on a small Android phone etc.
Having a large number of devices around the office can be a nightmare though. We’re constantly losing cables and chargers (and devices) and it takes ages to connect them up and test on them all. That’s why we built the 64 Digital Super Dooper Device Testing Station (name still up for debate).
Building it was pretty simple, we went to B&Q and bought some wood, constructed a cabinet with some thin shelves to put the devices on. We then used strips of Velcro above the shelves to allow us to fix the devices to the cabinet.
The next step was to drill some 30mm holes at intervals along the shelves so that we could pass all the cables through to the inside of the (most of them are small Micro USBs but the iPhones and iPads have silly proprietary connectors).
