.mobi – stoimen's web log

PHP: Mobile Devices HTTP_USER_AGENT Strings

Stoimen — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:04:07 +0000

So You’re Going Mobile

It’s nice that at least you’re moving your site to mobile device. It’s really important. Now if you’re using PHP the question is how to detect the mobile browser.

HTTP_USER_AGENT

Every PHP developer knows that $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] string optionally contain the browser that access your site, but what are the possible values of this string?

The Answer is …

in that really really full list of user agent strings: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html

Mobile Internet Users are Getting More Important

Stoimen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:17:29 +0000

Internet Mobile

It isn’t strange that the internet is becoming more and more mobile. When it matters to news sites I think most of the mobile versions are better than the “desktop” versions of the site. Take a look at Huffingtonpost.com or LeMonde.fr.

Mobile Ads

The first thing that makes impression when comparing both mobile and desktop versions of a site is the layout. Of course the lack of ads on the mobile version, or if not the absolute lack at least the small number of appearing ads, seems to be quite pleasant.

The thing is that as the web grow and as the web 2.0 is becoming a reality most of us will prefer to use it on a mobile device, just because it’s

easier to use
easier to find
easier to follow

Here’s a nice example of what mobile phones are now.

Now lets take a look on how the mobile web will grow in the near future.

That graphics describe quite well what will happen in the upcoming years. Is there now a question: should I make a mobile version of my site?

Change the Viewport, be Ready for the iPhone!

Stoimen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:07:08 +0000

Sites for mobile

Have you ever noticed that once you start designing a site for mobile, as iPhone and Nexus One from Google are, the site is looking really ugly! These two devices in particular, as may other using Opera Mini for instance, scale the site, because only than you can view the entire layout and than zoom to a particular part of the page.

This is nice because news sites as cnn.com or lemonde.fr are full of text & image information and once zoomed in they fit the screen – very nice feature of the browsers. However if you’d like to design a site for mobile the bad part comes here. Yeah you know how to detect the browser, that was a topic of one of my previous posts, but even than you fully functional, but less decorated site is scaled again and looks more ugly than the full version of the site.

How to make a site visible in mobile …

Look at the http://mobile.twitter.com/ – the problem is that if you open this link with a normal browser, not from mobile, you’ll get redirected to the twitter.com and you cannot see the difference.

You can see how it’s made on …

The digg’s mobile version. Look at http://m.digg.com/. This time you can see the different approach just by looking at the source code. Pay attention to meta tag in the head – it simply says – “don’t scale”. Nice thing to notice!

Don’t scale my site anymore:

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