Our ongoing look at Adobe Creative Suite 3 continues with a peek at Device Central. This application, bundled with most CS3 products like Dreamweaver and Photoshop, is used to test designs for cell phones and other mobile devices.

The program contains a variety of “skins” for popular cell phones – just load in an HTML page, Flash movie, wallpaper image, or other content piece and choose a device to see how it looks and works. Or, start from scratch in Device Central, checking out the specifications of phones you wish to design for. A few clicks and you’ll know what screen size, color profile, Flash Player version, and other specs to plan for.

Tons of popular phone settings are included, and you can compare the specifications of each before embarking on a design.

Many Web designers are called upon to retrofit their designs to work on mobile devices. After creating big CSS documents, wide tables, or elaborate graphics, this can be a disappointing task… load your site into some of the popular skins in Device Central, and you’ll see your hard work quickly shrunken and rearranged by Small Screen Rendering.

Even the simplest page is broken up when emulated in the popular Motorola RAZR.

But by seeing how an existing page looks in a mobile device, and using the buttons on the phone skin in Device Central to scroll through the page, you can get a good idea of how to revise the page to create a mobile-only version that looks much better.

Device Central is great for creating phone wallpaper images from Photoshop or Illustrator. Explore the phone specs in Device Central to determine the best size, then move to Photoshop or Illustrator to create your design. In the Save for Web dialog in either application, click Device Central to automatically check your image in a phone skin. You can even see how your image will look if the phone’s backlight is turned off or if light is reflecting on the phone screen!

Device Central offers lots of viewing options to simulate real life phone usage.

Finally, if you’re a Flash designer creating interactive content for cell phones, Device Central will be an important part of your workflow. In addition to seeing the version of Flash Lite supported on the phones of your choice, you can actually test the memory use and performance of your SWF file on various phones.

No matter how you choose to use Device Central, you’ll want to keep this app updated frequently. Go to Devices > Check for Device Updates to download the latest device profiles and skins.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 5:14 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.