Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Kudos To Weather.com

While I believe that Facebook is still king of the MobileSafari web apps hill, I have to give props to Weather.com (The Weather Channel) for very nearly toppling Facebook’s status. The iPhone-optimized version of Weather.com is nice, but what really makes it stand out is when you rotate your phone to landscape orientation. Every site—even iPhone-optimized sites—that I’ve visited before simply stretch the content to fill the width. It’s very acceptable and expected. Yet, the mobile Weather.com page actually offers a revised template for the landscape mode which moves buttons and controls from the bottom to the side, making better use of the wide space versus the tall space. Not only have I not seen any other web app do this, I didn’t even know it was possible. I thought the stretch-to-fill-width was a default behavior of the iPhone and nothing that a programmer can control. Clearly, though, the iPhone sends some sort of flag that says “I’m in landscape mode” so that a programmer can use an alternate stylesheet. That is very cool!

» Posted by ALBj at 11:30 AM (ET)
Category: Cool Technology

Comments

Indeed it does: http://tinyurl.com/yrne2e

» Posted by Michael Tsai
October 16, 2007 01:26 PM

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