Remote debugging of sites on mobile and tablets is getting a little easier, but still has too many pain points; for example, while you can debug iOS Safari through desktop Safari, you can only do so with a single device at a time; and to debug on Android you have to download and install the full SDK, and even that only works with Chrome.

Adobe Edge Inspect is useful for remote debugging but is limited by many requirements: you must install an app on each target device, so it won’t work on any platform other than Android or iOS; it uses Chrome desktop for the debug tools (although a new open API may open that to other browsers); and you must buy a subscription to unlock multi-device debugging.

If you want to do truly cross-platform remote debugging on the cheap you need weinre, a free and open source project which is actually the basis of Edge Inspect; Adobe bought the technology, then released the original source under an open license. weinre’s quite easy to install, although it doesn’t appear to be, so in this article I’m going to lay out the few simple steps required to get it up and running.

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I’ve just returned from a few days in Amsterdam, where I was fortunate enough to be part of the first (and only?) CSS Day, an event organised by the team behind Mobilism and Fronteers, who are consummately professional and deserve huge congratulations and thanks for all their work. The conference had the aim of diving deep into CSS through each of the eight speakers discussing a module (or modules) of the CSS spec. My chosen subject was Animations and Transitions; my slides are online now, video should follow shortly.

The day before the conference I gave a whole-day workshop on Responsive Web Design, teaching design and development approaches and – more importantly – a new workflow more adapted to the demands of the new way of working. I was helped hugely in this by the fact that I’d recently finished reading Stephen Hay‘s new book, Responsive Design Workflow.

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