After all the 'mobile talk' at the recent Scotch on the Rocks conference my interest was piqued into looking at mobile versions of sites, and how we as developers can try and seamlessly integrate mobile platforms into our web applications.
The article deals with the first step of that, which is detecting if your user is hitting your site on a mobile platform.
There is a full example of this here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/detect/, hitting this URL with an iPhone or Android device will serve up a different response.
It hadn't struck me before Serge Jespers Scotch on the Rocks talk that you could quite easily pick up the users browser version in the CGI scope using Coldfusion. This value pretty much always contains the Operating System name as well.
As a test I created a script that would email me the correct CGI value, just so I could catalogue the responses from the different devices.
Android request:
ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; HTC Desire 1.15.161.4 Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17
1Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; HTC Desire 1.15.161.4 Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17
Iphone request:
ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16
1Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16
IE 8 request:
ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
1Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Firefox request:
ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100315 Firefox/3.5.9 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
1Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100315 Firefox/3.5.9 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Next it's a simple case of finding a distinct value in the cgi.http_user_agent string, and redirecting. In this way you could tailor the mobile experience to different markets.
ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
<cfif findNoCase('Android', cgi.http_user_agent,1)>
<!--- relocate to Android version of the mobile site --->
<cflocation url="android/">
<cfelseif findNoCase('iPhone', cgi.http_user_agent,1)>
<!--- relocate to iphone version of the mobile site --->
<cflocation url="iphone/">
</cfif>
1<cfif findNoCase('Android', cgi.http_user_agent,1)>
2 <!--- relocate to Android version of the mobile site --->
3 <cflocation url="android/">
4<cfelseif findNoCase('iPhone', cgi.http_user_agent,1)>
5 <!--- relocate to iphone version of the mobile site --->
6 <cflocation url="iphone/">
7</cfif>
There is a full example of this here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/detect/, hitting this URL with an iPhone or Android device will serve up a different response.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10
Good call on the iPad User Agent, I think your right, in that it will become a common mobile browsing platform, and I guess it has its own screen dimensions and functionality, so whatever App you are writing could be tailored to it.
(Glad you copied and pasted the code, thought for a second you'd durned to the 'dark side' and bought one!)
No problem. Also, I am not sure why, but someone was telling me at the CFUG that Google Voice thinks the iPad is the iPhone and keeps asking for his phone number. Very odd! Maybe Google sees "WebKit" as the "mobile" browser.
Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.141 Mobile Safari/534.1+
I do not have a blackberry so I cannot test this. Anybody?
BlackBerry is certainly worth looking into, especially with the market share it has. I want to spend a bit more time with this and detect some of the new tablet devices as well.
I'll try the BlackBerry simulator, hopefully it will spoof the device type: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/resources/simu...