Whenever a new device or sector appears   I like to produce a reference application, just to see what the development experience is like.

For years this has been an I-Ching fortune telling application (don’t ask me why).

Anyway to test cross browser compatibility between Windows Mobile and Apple Webkit,   I’ve just ported this old app.     Its a web-application, so fairly simple to port.

I just added a style-sheet reference and using an ASP.NET master page, was able to add the proprietary viewport tags to the head section, to make things look right on iPhone,  as follows -

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>

I’ve also used this code chunk to automatically redirect if we are coming in from an Apple device -

       bool isiphone = false;
       bool isipod = false;

      try
        {
            isiphone = (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf("iPhone;") != -1);
            isipod = (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf("iPod;") != -1);
        }
        catch
        {

        }

        if (isiphone || isipod)
        {
            Response.Redirect("iphone");
        }

So if you’re interested point your browser to http://www.binaryrefinery.com/i-ching

I’m the first to admit, I don’t have the patience to-do the full beautiful user interface that maybe this application deserves,  but here’s the result -

So porting experience fairly simple,    I notice that unlike Windows Mobile the HTML buttons on Safari don’t wrap very nicely,  so you end up with loooong  thin buttons.    Oh well, something else to work on….

Hope your all having a great weekend.