iPhone Web-Development.

Now that you have your custom icon set up for iPhone users, here is another helpfull guide from the folks at apple to get you started on developing iPhone versions of your site. The guide has some examples on how to make content that are optimized for iPhone’s gesture-based, windowless environment.

With the iPhone accounting for larger and larger amounts of mobile browsing, despite being 2% of the smart phone market, it seems like a worth while endeavour.

But how to deliver the iPhone version too iPhone users? Browser detection, or more specifcly HTTP_USER_AGENT; this data, as well as IP address, OS, and the requested document are sent to the server.

Here is how to do this detection and content distrabution via a shell script.
Rather do it as a shell script? Me too. Here’s how I’d do that as a rudimentary Linux shell script:

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -z "$(echo $HTTP_USER_AGENT | grep iPhone)" ] ; then
echo "Location: iphone.php"
else
echo "Location: index.php"
fi
exit 0

You can also have specific CSS information sent to diffrent user agents through if expresions.
#if expr="(${HTTP_USER_AGENT} = /iPhone/)"

#endif

Written by John Leschinski from Leschinski Design
Posted on February 16th, 2008 and filed under Design & Coding
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