You can’t miss it! Apple is here to stay so web developers need to make sure that our sites look their best on these various mobile devices. I implemented a user agent script on a Sugar Land photographer’s website. He wanted to make sure that when you came to a mobile device (especially an iPhone) that the site was usable. We implemented a Flash graphic on the homepage (which the iPhone cannot render), so the page automatically redirects you to a single web page with a sample of his photography and his contact information.

Check it out: www.makeyousmilephotography.com

Apple Agents

Devices that request content from your website (usually) pass a user agent string. This contains information such as its name, OS, browser version, and rendering engine. Apple’s gadgets pass the following user agents, although you may find subtle variations in the version numbers.

iPhone:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

iPod:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A101a Safari/419.3

iPad:

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/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

Or, just this handy tool, http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/. It is a script that will redirect the website for you.

“This PHP function lets you choose how to manage your mobile visitors, they can be redirected to a page built for mobiles or you can use it to decide which markup language and stylesheet to show that user.”