On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, William Volk wrote:
> We're thinking of having t-shirts printed up with:
>
> "But it worked on the emulator!"
>
> In fact sometimes it DOESN'T work on the emulator and DOES work on the
> phone.
This is actually one of the reasons I tend to stay away from developing
stuff that runs directly on the phone.
I don't know what planet these engineers are from, but it's obviously
one with a huge number of low-paid, reliable testers available. I can
think of several things that would easily cut the cost of phone software
development by half or three quarters:
1. Emulators that emulate the phone hardware, running the actual
phone software. Sure, it would be slower, but you're running on
a CPU that's much faster than the phone anyway.
2. Hooks in the emulator to let you programatically send input to
the phone and grab the output for analysis.
3. The ability, on phones themselves, to plug in a cable and not
only send keystrokes, but get back the changes being made to the
screen.
4. The ability, in both emulators and on phones, to get higher-level
"events" going to the screen, i.e., "make the letter 'A' appear at
such-and-such a pixel location, with such-and-such a colour." Think
X11 windowing system protocol.
All of this stuff would make automated testing possible, letting you
bring millions of virtual monkies to bear on your testing problem.
In fact, it might well be possible to do this as a third-party product.
Certainly Docomo phones here let you attach a device to the data port at
the bottom that can send keystrokes to the phone. If you had a little
scanner you could strap over the screen (much like that one used for
projecting a phone screen, except with better resolution) you could get
the screen contents into a computer-readable format.
Given that, you just need some good software on the host side, and
you've got the ultimate way to test programs running on a mobile phone.
Or even web sites, for that matter. Heck, you could even test--for
real--the latency of network games.
Hmmmm....anybody want to start a company with me?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Fri Apr 15 05:40:53 2005