Scott Hanselman

If you're noticing when looking at your blog traffic logs that more and more people are visiting your site from a mobile device, you likely want to be accommodating.

I have noticed recently that mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch and Danger Hiptop (well, that's probably just one guy) have been creeping up my list of Browsers+OSs that visit this blog.

How can I make their experience suck less? Just because the iPhone has Safari and can handle most full-size doesn't mean I should go bonkers with the HTML. There's a few simple things that can be done to make the experience more seamless.

Add Home Screen iPhone Icons for your Website

If you visit a website on an iPhone and hit the plus button and click Add to Home Screen...

NOTE: Hold down HOME and the LOCK button to take iPhone screenshots.

You'll get this screen with a generated thumbnail icon of the current browser's screen. In this case, it's way too tiny and doesn't really well represent my site. It's certainly not an icon that I'd want on an iPhone's Home Screen.

However, if you make a 60x60 PNG image file and name it "apple-touch-icon.png" and put it in the root of your website, you'll get control over that icon.

If you don't have control over the root of your domain you can add a <link> to your pages and point it to whatever PNG you like wherever you like:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/customIcon.png"/>

Now, if you hit Add to Home Screen, you'll get a nice image with automatically rounded corners and a shiny bevel (the phone does that), your icon like this, will show up like this:

Very little effort for a considerable amount of polish.

Adjust the ViewPort for a "Pre-Zoomed" iPhone Experience

Next, if you visit a web page with Mobile Safari and you always double tap to select the content and zoom to the width of it, why not just set that as an initial default? Just add a <meta> tag like this:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=670, initial-scale=0.45, minimum-scale=0.45"/>

That will set the width of the "viewport" - the part of the page that is visible in the zoomed-in view - as well as the the initial zoom scale and minimum scale. This makes for a pre-zoomed and easily scrolled experience that doesn't change the way the page is laid out.

It's still the full content, just pre-zoomed for the iPhone.

Enabling All Mobile Devices

Next, to the mobile users who are not using an iPhone, about two years ago I added support to DasBlog for a custom Mobile Theme that would enable Windows Mobile and Blackberry Mobile Browser users to browse DasBlogs more comfortably. In the DasBlog web.config there is a huge section at the end that was populated from this CodeProject article on BrowserCaps. It uses the older ASP.NET 1.1 style of browser detection.

For example, if I wanted to serve a Mobile Theme to iPhone users that visit my blog, I could add these lines to the filter areas for platforms and OS's:

<case match="iPhone">
  platform="iPhone"
</case>
...snip...
<case match="iPhone">
  os="iPhone"
</case>
...snip...
<case match="iPhone" with="%{os}">
  isMobileDevice="true"
</case>

DasBlog then just checks like this and does the right thing. DasBlog uses its own theming engine, but you can use this kind of detection and "downgrade" your site for any device you like.

//Are we on a Mobile Device? See if we have a mobile theme and use it instead.
System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities mobile = (System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities)Request.Browser;
if(mobile.IsMobileDevice == true)
{
    theme = themes["mobile"];
    if(theme == null)
    {
        loggingService.AddEvent(new EventDataItem(EventCodes.Error,
            String.Format("If you have a theme called 'mobile' in your themes folder, 
                readers who visit your site via a Mobile Device will automatically 
                get that theme. User-Agent: {0}",Request.UserAgent),
            String.Empty));
    }
    else
    {
        return theme;
    }
}

Either way, if you choose to setup a custom Mobile theme for a visitor, or you just add a few bits of "chrome" like friendly icons and some browser specific metadata, it's important to at least be conscious of who is visiting your site in which devices and feel empowered to make good experiences for them.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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