Metropol

A treat for those of you who need to access metropol when you're on the move...

In theory, those of you visiting with smartphones should now see a simpler version of Metropol. Simply visit the normal URL and thanks to a nice bit of browser sniffing you should get a site without the background and with a simple, text based menu up top.

This brings several advantages over the old kludge, such as the ability to see avatars and attachments and not being crap and annoying. Also due to it using text links and not downloading the large background image it should save you some data costs.

If you want a sneaky peak on your pc, simply click this link, you can then go back to the normal version by clicking the link up top.

Oh and this is a Beta version btw, its not very polished but its a proof of concept more than anything. I'll see about getting it look fabber in time.

Why is the guy in the pic wearing such a bad suit and pair of shoes? I think we should be told!

It's great, but it's just a shame it doesn't autodetect my device is a mobile and I have to add ?media=mobile to the URL manually. The only thing I feel compelled to say is that the data cosumption is slightly higher with this new system compared with the PhpBB Table layout you used as a kludge. In fact I dare say the mobile version should use no CSS and no footer images of John Price at all. However it is definitely better than the previous mobile solution in terms of how it renders.

Here's a screenshot of how it looks:

what is your device cdd? can you get me its useragent please?

Like I said, work in progress and a lot of the CSS can be stripped away in time.

Why is my firefox using the mobile version!?

Bail wrote:Why is my firefox using the mobile version!?

Did you click the Sneak peek link? You need to click Use Standard Version at the top to reset that.

Using Safari on the iPhone, and its justs loads up the normal version.

Hymagumba wrote:what is your device cdd? can you get me its useragent please?

It is:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 6.12)

OK well two updates.

firstly, iemobile has been added to the useragent list

secondly, i've decided that instead of starting with the full stylesheet and stripping back, i'm starting with no stylesheet and adding things that are needed which should be much easier and result in a smaller download.

just wondering if this still works? because of the size of the background image metropol is a bit slow on an iphone/ipod..a mobile version would be smashing (can't test because my battery died)

If you want a useragent for the iDevices, it'd be..

Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 M

It might change for iPhones.