For Christmas I got an iPod touch - and I can't believe how awesome it is. Not one to go for the clickywheel on the other traditional iPods, I decided that I would support Steve Jobs in his mission to abolish buttons by asking Santa for an iPod Touch. Pah, iPhones are too expensive.
I also adore Mobile Safari, so much so in fact that I created a small PHP and JavaScript function to detect whether the user is using an iPod Touch or an iPhone to browse your site. I felt that I needed to write one because Mobile Safari seemed to break my site design with weird font sizes, so I removed the comments section and made my homepage slightly more compact just for users sporting a shiny Mobile Safari user agent.
Two functions to detect Mobile Safari in different ways:
The PHP Function
Offering server side awesomeness, this is probably the best technique for detecting mobile Safari if you use PHP for your site.
function ismobilesafari(){
if(preg_match('/iPod/',$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])){return true;}
if(preg_match('/iPhone/',$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])){return true;}
else{return false;}
}
// Example usage, to echo a message to the user:
if(ismobilesafari()){
echo('It's mobile safari.');
}
else{
echo('Nope, it's another browser.');
}
The JavaScript Function
The client side coolness still works, except some weird people disable JavaScript on their iPod/iPhone, so might not work 100% of the time.
function ismobilesafari(){
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPod') != -1){return true;}
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPhone') != -1){return true;}
else{return false;}
}
// Example usage, to echo a message to the user:
if(ismobilesafari()){
document.write('It's mobile safari.');
}
else{
document.write('Nope, it's another browser.');
}
Screenshotz
Both of the functions + examples above will result in the following:
