I just StumbledUpon an interesting WordPress plugin: iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme. This plugin will automatically detect the Apple iPhone User Agent reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing with a special theme only to iPhone visitors (man, that was a mouthful!), all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme.
In the past, I have installed plugins for the Wii and PSP browsers but ultimately removed them – that was during my 41-plugins-installed days. My question is this: Would you/should you install this plugin? We all know that the iPhone’s Safari browser is a true browser, it renders the web as it should be – but should we make content easier to read on a 320 x 480 screen?
Enter iPhoney
Speaking of the iPhone, I found this interesting application called iPhoney. Here is the description from the site:
iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.
iPhoney is not an iPhone simulator but instead is designed for web developers who want to create 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) websites for use with iPhone. It gives you a canvas on which to test the visual quality of your designs. If you have questions about iPhoney, visit our issue tracker on SourceForge, as our support team doesn’t provide technical support for iPhoney.
Unfortunately, it’s a Mac only application and it wont show you load times but I thought it was very interesting! Again, would you install this plugin in the off chance someone will access your site from the iPhone?
Never!!!
The reason building websites is so problematic is inconsistencies in browser formats, namely the fact that MS went their own way in IE… and now they cannot get back to W3C standards in IE7 as all the old “built for IE6″ sites will fall over.
It is up to vendors to make sure their software can render pages correctly, installing plugins that allow them to do a botch job is counter productive IMO…
Jez
I agree. You could try to please every single variable, but you’ll end up living in 1998.
Force the motherdevelopers to make standards-compliant software!!
That said, if your site is “elastic” it should render on a low res screen anyway…. you could build a site that would reduce to that size…. but with monitors going in the opposite direction (higher res) it becomes more difficult to hold together… so even if its just the res you are talking about, I still would not bother…. how many people will seriously surf the net using an i phone anyway???
That’s a great point, I considered installing it but decided that people wont really be viewing this site from an iPhone anway…