The strange case of 'Made for iPhone' websites

Load your favourite website like an iPhone using Firefox sidebar.

Required:
- Firefox
- User Agent extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
- Profile for iPhone (shown below)

Instructions:

First of all, install the extension above. Add it to your toolbar and click the down-arrow and select Options. Under Options you can add a new profile. Add one called iPhone. Use the profile described in the link above or as shown here:

Description: iPhone
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
App Version: Version/3.0
Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

You will have to restart FF at some point after installing the extension for User Agent. You should have a bookmark for Meebo.com, right-click the bookmark and select Properties. Click on the option to LOAD THIS BOOKMARK IN A SIDEBAR and click OK.

Click on UserAgent (which should be in your toolbar, if it isn't then right-click the toolbar, select customize and add it). Select the newly added iPhone UserAgent profile.

Click on the bookmark for Meebo, it should load in a sidebar. Log-in.

Click back on the main FF window. Select UserAgent "default" profile and continue to browse normally in your main window.

A bit cumbersome, but it does work.

--> this also works with the facebook website at http://iphone.facebook.com

wouldn't "fashion" and being "in" be the reason to design iphone targeted sites? what is the percentage of iphone users vs regular net users? is it so big to force your company design an iphone specific version? some sites (apple related I would guess) may indeed need it. The rest would do it so they sound "trendy" and "up to date".

"Hey, we got an iphone targeted version, we 're cool"

either it's not the full internet or these iphone specific versions should not exist. Pick one.

It does seem a shame ... even when the shoe is on the other foot. :)

I've never heard anyone from Apple suggest that web developers optimize their existing sites for the iPhone. Quite the contrary....they designed Safari for the iPhone to display virtually any page without reformatting. The obvious exception is sites requiring Flash, but that seems to be a decision based on battery life and responsiveness of the page more than anything.

What Apple DID say is that developers could design web-apps specifically for the iphone and that is what is occurring. I don't think this is a problem, and I do not see any contradiction from previous Apple policies/philosophy.

If I were a web designer, given the popularity of the iPhone I would certainly take it into account when designing a web page. If I could modify my existing content to make it load faster on the iPhone (or any handheld for that matter) then I certainly would. It's smart business. I don't think it's fair to blame apple for creating a device impressive enough to change the way designers think about their web sites.

I think the main difference is that iphone apps are hardly exclusionary - a sudoku game, a currency converter, chess, BART schedule, etc ... all things you can find elsewhere or even better ... the main difference is with an IE only site like ups.com, you are stuck.

I'm sorry, but your critique is simply preposterous. The problem with web apps that only worked on IE6 PC's was that it intentionally kept minor players from using the market. Just as you can't ride your bicycle on the highway, if that kind of internet coding stayed inthe mainstream, you'd never be able to fully use your mac to use the internet. On the other hand, these "iPhone-ified" websites are much more like having a bikelane. The vast majority of users can still use the internet, there are just little niche websites for a little niche community.

I don’t see this as some disturbing new paradigm shift (although I too see the irony of advertising the iphone as “the real internet” and making it run on a network so slow it forces people to retreat to mobile-web type sites).

Its really just an EDGE thing. When I’m on a wifi connection I never bother with the iPhone-ified versions of sites. I am actually fine with edge because AT&T doesn’t offer 3g anywhere in my state but fast it isn’t and browsing the real Amazon for a quick price check is nowhere near as easy as using Telemoose. But as soon as its more prevalent and a critical mass of iPhone users moves the 3G my guess is that these stripped down sites will become irrelevant and fade from view.

The only reason we've now got this growing sub-set of iPhone-only web pages is because a proper robust sdk has not yet arrived. I'm waiting patiently, it seems a bit funny that the strengths toward creating a program for OS X are not being leveraged in this discussion. The argument is always about the weakness of the network and not the strength of the platform. Integration is the whole point of this device, no? Why no RSS-specific app on the phone or how about editing of media residing in storage? Instead we're jumping through hoops to make web-based solutions that ultimately only look great on this one device. I'm sure Google Gears has a lot to do with Apple's current strategy but damn I wish all you guys were developing using a dashcode/yellow-box solution. We've come so far with standards-based design only to ignore the real problem by backtracking toward proprietary display.

Maybe part of the answer is that certain websites want to ride along on the iPhone hype to promote their online content. If you're on your iPhone and you have the option , wouldn't you choose the iPhone tailored site?

[shameless but to the point self promotion ;-)]http://portal.inuron.com/blog-iphone.php Read this article for some thoughts on how the 'limitations' of touchscreens could influence the future of web- and application- design.
[/end shameless self promotion]

One thing to remember is, we cannot develop actual apps for the iPhone right now. What we *can* do is optimize our website or web app to work better on the iphone, so that perhaps an actual app is not necessary.