With Nokia closing down their device labs 🙁  I found I needed a new place to do Windows 8 device testing, and with a little digging I found Perfecto Mobile.  Perfecto Mobile is an entirely web based platform that allows you to access and test your apps on a lot of different devices, it give you access to iOS, Android, and Windows 8 devices – which is really all you need 🙂

Similarly to Nokia’s remote testing lab, Samsung has thier own remote testing lab.  It’s pretty much the same concept, for free you get 5 hours of testing time with real devices per day.

In general the devices are a lot more quicker and responsive then Nokia’s.  Unless you want to test on older devices – they crash at every turn and are pretty unusable. :/  But, they’re latest devices on there are great to have access to for testing. 🙂  If you’re developing for Android, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

I happened upon a new rails learning resource today called codelearn 🙂 It’s a little confusing actually setting up your account, and there’s no settings or user profiles yet. It appears that the whole site is currently in beta and is free for the moment, but may cost a little cheddar in the future. Once you have an account and figure out where the classes work the interface is pretty cool. It has the interactive terminal like a lot of other similar sites have, and it’s code editor isn’t unique either, but what is quite cool that I haven’t seen done before is that it has a file browser and app output. Where you can actually click through the file tree of the app you’re working on, and physically see and click around the app you’re building.

Those are some pretty nice features and I appreciate that you can actually explore the app a bit and poke through the code, so I’m definitely planning on going through all the coursework they currently have available 🙂 I would love to get a profile link where I can include the course progress in my extended resume, but hopefully that will be added on later 🙂

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 😉