On my quest to find a way to test my windows app I finally came across Nokia Developer Remove Device Access.  It’s a bit of a mouthfull and does pretty much exactly what the name implies.  They give you free access to a pull of real nokia devices that you can control from a program on your computer.

It isn’t strictly Windows phone devices that they have either, they have a plethera of other nokia devices that you can hot wire and take for a spin.  Most noteable however, is that they give you access to their full Lumia line that’s running Windows 8.  Not to say that Android and iOS isn’t nice either…but there are some nicer alternatives to testing on those devices.  Like Sauce Labs or running Android as a virtual machine.

The big drawback here is that there is immense lag.  For each action you take it takes about 30 seconds for the device to realize you’ve done something and react.  Obviously this makes testing features a bit like pulling teeth.

But it’s free and (eventually) does the job 🙂  So you can’t complain 😉

I was trying to track down an effective way to test PhoneGap for Windows devices when I came across the ripple emulator extension for Google Chrome.

Sadly this doesn’t help my issue with windows :/  And it is a few versions behind for PhoneGap, but I was happy to see some errors showing up in my browser that had only shown up on an actual device before.

Specifically I have noticed the back button styling for one of my apps was misaligned, it looked fine in the browser, but was broken on actual devices.  As well as some error dialogs that would just error out in a normal browser because they were dependant on PhoneGap actually work in ripple 🙂

It doesn’t eliminate the need for device testing, but being able to fix a few more issues before having to compile the app is definitely a time saver.

Matching mobile icons for all your app advertising needs 😀 Click for the full versions.

I was working with a nice piece of stock today, nothing horrible, but the lighting was a bit plain, and I was using it for the hero image on the page and wanted something a bit more visually interesting.

I came across this really great tutorial on faking HDR in photoshop, it’s 8 steps, took  minutes, and the result is lovely :3

It’s 8 Easy Steps to Fake an HDR Look in Photoshop by rod rodriguez.

I’m so happy with results I wanted to keep a copy of it here for the next time I want to jazz something up with a little fake HDR 🙂