iPad + Air Display app = iPhone app testing nirvana
A neat little setup for testing your iPhone apps in the simulator with touches instead of mouse clicks using an iPad and an app called Air Display.
testing
15 Jun 2010
The iPhone Simulator is a handy development tool for debugging your iPhone and iPad apps as you develop them. It is not, however, in any way an alternative to testing on an actual device. One of the reasons that the iPhone Simulator doesn't give you the actual device experience is because your Mac's screen is not a touch screen. Until now, if you wanted that, you would have to either test on your actual device or use an app like iSimulate to send touches (and other device data) to your app. While iSimulate and its ilk are still a good alternative, I've found a setup that serves me well for 90% of my debug-time testing: an iPad, coupled with the Air Display app.
Check out the Ad Hoc Packager script I released that is far better than the old bash script.
When deploying beta builds of your iPhone apps, you make what is known is an Ad Hoc distribution. Apple's instructions tell you that you should zip up the Ad Hoc distribution and send it to your testers along with your .mobileprovision file. As John Hartzog discovered, however, using the Compress option in Finder for Ad Hoc distribution has drawbacks so you should use the command line to package up your Ad Hoc distributions.
Backing up and restoring the datastore in your local SDK can be very useful for several use cases. Personally, I find that I alternate between running the local SDK with a restore of data from the deployment environment and with an empty or test datastore.
The local SDK slows down painfully when you populate it with real amounts of data so sometimes I test with an empty datastore while developing. Restoring data, however, takes a long time too so I don't want to run my restore process all the time. And I don't have to, since I can simply backup the local datastore and restore is by copying it back.
Developer emptor: I just lost a couple of hours to this: make sure you disable the Google App Engine doctest import in your apps when you're done testing a module lest you encounter _weird_ errors. I started having the login URL returned by users.create_login_url() being returned incorrectly when I forgot to remove the doctest import. It started forwarding to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?continue=. Check out my forum post on it here.
I love Python's doctests. Basically, you test out your functions in the interactive shell and copy the results into the comments for a function. That's it! So simple.
I've had a hard time trying to get Internet Explorer on Windows (under Parallels) to connect to the Google App Engine local development server running on OS X.
The interesting thing was that IE would connect to the built-in web server on the Mac without problem (using the Shared Network setting, I could also connect to any other web site.) But I couldn't connect to the development server either via IP or via the computer name using Bonjour for Windows.