This site seems to display two separate vertical scrollbars, one for the page and one for the iframe within the page. Attempting to scroll only affects the page scrollbar, making it difficult to scroll down in the iframe.
I think the point is to show the part of the page that is visible to the current device and fade out the rest, but only when you've force picked a size.
We have that html as a development-only page in our framework, so when developing/designing a site we can go to /responsive and test it that way, very convenient.
I'm obviously biased because I have a similar site of my own (http://areyouresponsive.com), but I love seeing new tools to facilitate building response websites.
Pretty awesome. It even works with port numbers, but only if you use it directly in the URL (entering :3000 into the top right address bar doesnt work). http://responsive.is/localhost:3000
There's also an error in the CSS that prevents the view icons from displaying in that case. "background: url(img/state-icons.png) no-repeat;" needs to be "background: url(/img/state-icons.png) no-repeat;"
Actually, it's once you're looking at a page in a subdirectory of your own server's doc root, for any URL, not just localhost:PORT#.
Argh, this would've been so useful just 48 hours ago at a big client meeting where I presented a dozen wireframe layouts with a responsive design. As a designer, I tried something new by skipping Fireworks and going straight from sketches to laying it out in Bootstrap.
Pros: saved an insane amount of time - a dozen templates instantly became 48 templates because each page had 4 resolutions.
Cons:
* it was awkward to resize the browser window 4 times per page, so this Responsive.is tool would've helped immensely, especially with how it highlights the active window port and allows the rest of the content to be masked but still faintly visible, so the layout doesn't feel cramped because you can see a quick preview of the rest of the content "below the fold".
* the default Bootstrap styling is so plain that it felt like half of the critiques were about the boxiness of the visual design, not the visual hierarchy of the information itself. Themes wouldn't help for this particular client because they're a big giant company that have their own branding anyway.
So prototyping with Bootstrap gave me way more templates in a short of amount of time but it's ugly enough that stakeholder critiques were distracted by it (which is why I usually stick to high fidelity mockups and use wireframes only for internal team collaboration, if at all). More production-ready in some ways (the frontend dev on the team finally got engaged with feedback and is ready for handoff) and less in others (stakeholders won't give real feedback until they see it styled with polish).
This is absolutely horrendous in Firefox 7. About 60% of the bottom of the screen is completely black, leaving only about 300px high of contents, in any of the views.
It is the page I was linked to. But responsive.is displays a random website, and this website in particular didn't work. I guess if I had realized it was just a random website perhaps my reaction would have been different.
Used Skeleton's 12-column CSS framework, which was a bit buggy. Has 4 breakpoints - 960 width, ipad portrait, iphone landscape and iphone portrait. The gray border up top represents where the menu will reside and scale. I'm not thrilled with how we handled the transition to mobile - the varying blocks of text in 'who we are' and the subsequent example need to be more differentiated.
I am still not convinced that such layouts are good for mobile pages. For example the bostonglobe page wont let me zoom at all on my android phone. This is ok as long as the default font size is fine for me, but I often encounter websites where I want to increase the font size.
Actually modern mobile browsers can handle unresponsive layouts quite well, often better than some "responsive" Layouts.
Responsive design works wonders for text-based websites like newspapers and blogs. The new Boston Globe sets the bar with it. Doesn't work very well when you're developing dashboard or other data-driven applications. You're going to have to build the mobile app at some point so might as well start sooner than later. In the mean time, responsive design will bridge the gap.
