Glimpse, a Chrome Extension for Mobile Web Developers
Mobile web development is lots more demanding than classical desktop design, because it extends the stage to screen sizes you usually do not have at hand while developing. Of course you might be able to do proper testing on target devices, but doing so on every step of the way would blow up the efforts unbearably. Glimpse, a Chrome extension, does especially come in handy in those frequently occurring cases where you just tweaked that tiny bit and want to see if it totally breaks things or not.
Glimpse, Made by the Readability Crew
The guys behind Glimpse are no newbies. Arc90 are the creators of Readability, which you definitely will have heard of, unless you lived under a stone for the last few years. In their hackathons they go for new and exciting ideas, Glimpse resulted from their last effort.
What Glimpse does is simple. Once installed, it sits above your browser window, right beside the address bar. If you decide to click it, a tiny browser window, size of an iPhone, opens as a pop-over. It does not automatically populate with the content of the website you were currently surfing. Instead it acts as an independent browser instance.
Once clicked, you have to enter the url to be displayed into Glimpse’s url bar. The chosen url will then be called and automatically correctly displayed according to its media queries, if any.
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Glimpse and Smashing[/caption]
As Glimpse, at least at this moment, is fixed to the display of an iPhone size, it does not make for a complete solution. Yet, if you just need a quick check, there are not a lot of faster tools out there.
Glimpse lets you save frequently visited mobile sites right inside its window. It is not only targeted at web developers. Arc90 thinks that consumers in some cases prefer the mobile view of a particular website also. If you feel addressed, try it.
Glimpse has its issues. It does not function correctly if used on some of the more popular sites such as Twitter, Facebook and the like. Yet, as a tool for quickly checking your latest creation, it makes for an extension you should not go without.
Related Links
- Arc90 | Creators of Glimpse and Readability
- Glimpse | Chrome Web Store
Looks awesome, but wish it would bring up the current tab when you click on it instead of having to type or copy/paste a URL.
That’s what I demand, too…
It is a stunning extension, but I think the issues should be resolve because it is the age of these popular social networks and if this extension does not work properly for them then people will leave it slowly.