A. D.'s List: iPhone on rails

• To serve your mobile users, your Rails application needs to manage the  following:

   
   
  • Detecting when a user accesses the site using an iPhone or an iPod touch.
   
  • Allowing the user to freely switch between the mobile and regular versions of the site.
   
  • Using a different layout for Mobile Safari users, including separate Cascading  Style Sheets (CSS) files and, possibly, JavaScript libraries.
   
  • Serving different content to mobile users.
• Helvetica is the font of choice for iPhone system links. The font size is a little  smaller than recommended for body text, but this isn't supposed to be body text. The  other items will center the link in the viewport. The result looks like Figure 5

• The most important differences are:

   
   
  • The screen size of the iPhone (320x480) is much smaller than even the smallest target  application for a desktop Web application. The iPhone screen also has a significantly  different aspect ratio from a typical desktop or laptop monitor.
   
  • The pixel density of an iPhone is much greater than a desktop  monitor, allowing small text to be read somewhat more easily and somewhat changing the relative size of images.
   
  • Users can rotate the Mobile Safari view 90 degrees, changing the size and, more importantly, the aspect ratio of the screen.
   
  • The touch-screen interface to Mobile Safari is less precise than a mouse interface,  meaning that targets like buttons and links should be larger and farther apart than would be necessary in a desktop application.
   
  • An iPhone is often used under slow network conditions. However, users have a strong expectation that the responses to their actions will be nearly instant.

• There are two primary options for giving your Web application an iPhone look and feel:

   
   
  • Add your own CSS and JavaScript to your site based on Apple's sample code or other good-looking sites.
   
  • Use a pre-existing toolkit.
• That said, Apple's human-interface guidelines for iPhone call out the list format  as an "especially effective way" of organizing iPhone content, so you should  probably consider list organization if you can.

1 more annotation...

• Apple recommends that clickable targets be at least 44 pixels square for best usability.