OSNews > Thread > "RE: Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea." by Square

Meta: Open Sourcing OSNews' Mobile Detection Kit

Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 24th Apr 2008 22:45 UTC

We were always proud of OSNews' (and Gnomefiles.org's) mobile capabilities. We spent years collecting keywords to be able to automatically redirect or serve a mobile-formatted or WAP-formatted (wap.osnews.com) page to less capable browsers. We believe that this script can recognize 99% of the world's non-desktop browsers. We gave special care to not only phones, but PDAs, gaming devices, text browsers, even weird embedded systems browsers that most users have never heard of. Now, it's time to open source our PHP detection script so others can use it on their sites too. Download here, and read the included readme.txt file too before using. It explains what is what, and what its difference is compared to similar solutions found elsewhere. You can see the work this detection script does in our mobile statistics (OSNews serves about 1500 pageviews per day on non-desktop browsers via this script).

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RE: Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea.

by Square on Fri 25th Apr 2008 04:30 UTC in reply to "Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea."

Member since:
2005-10-01

I personally like the format of the main page in mobile view,its easy on the eyes and does the job well. However the comments section is almost unusable and needs better formatting for browsers that can do more then the basics

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RE[2]: Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea.

by Eugenia on Fri 25th Apr 2008 04:48 in reply to "RE: Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea."

Member since:
2005-06-28

Erm, these pages are made for browsers that can't do more than the basics, so the current format is the best that can be... Trust me, I spent years optimizing for so many devices that I was an avid collector of. You said that because you think too much with the "i will use the mobile site to avoid ads" hat on... ;-)

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RE[3]: Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea.

by Square on Fri 25th Apr 2008 05:20 in reply to "RE[2]: Ah... Nice gesture, **BAD** idea."

Member since:
2005-10-01

Actually I was referring more to my Nintendo Wii and my Recently purchased iPod Touch (that I ended up using as more of a web browser then a media player)
On my (crappy)cell phone however both the main page and the comments look/work fine

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1