Want to automatically detect mobile devices that access your Rails application? Mobile Fu allows you to do just that. People can access your site from a Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Nokia, etc. and it will automatically adjust the format of the request from :html to :mobile.
Simply add gem 'mobile-fu' to your Gemfile and run bundle install.
Add this this one line to the controller.
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
has_mobile_fu
end
Once this is in place, any request that comes from a mobile device will be be set as :mobile format. It is up to you to determine how you want to handle these requests. It is also up to you to create the .mobile.erb versions of your views that are to be requested.
Then add the line below to config/initializers/mime_types.rb
Mime::Type.register_alias "text/html", :mobile
I recommend that you setup a before_filter that will redirect to a specific page depending on whether or not it is a mobile request. How can you check this?
is_mobile_device? # => Returns true or false depending on the device
You can also determine which format is currently set in by calling the following:
in_mobile_view? # => Returns true or false depending on current req. format
Also, if you want the ability to allow a user to switch between 'mobile' and 'standard' format (:html), you can just adjust the mobile_view session variable in a custom controller action.
session[:mobile_view] # => Set to true if request format is :mobile and false
if set to :html
So, different devices need different styling. Don't worry, we've got this baked in to Mobile Fu.
If you are including a css or sass file via stylesheet_link_tag, all you have
to do is add _device to the name of one of your files to override your styling
for a certain device. The stylesheet that is loaded is dependant on which device
is making the request.
e.g., Accessing a page from a Blackberry.
... stylesheet_link_tag 'mobile.css' ...
This loads mobile.css, and mobile_blackberry.css if the file exists.
Supported stylesheet override device extensions at the moment are:
- blackberry
- iphone (iphone,ipod)
- ipad
- android
- mobileexplorer
- nokia
- palm
The stylesheet awesomeness was derived from Michael Bleigh's browserized styles
Inspiration for Mobile Fu came from Noel Rappin's rails_iui
Hopefully this should help you create some awesome mobile applications.
If you want to force the mobile interface for testing, you can either use a
mobile device emulator, or you can call force_mobile_format in a before filter.
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
has_mobile_fu
before_filter :force_mobile_format
end
Copyright (c) 2008 Brendan G. Lim, Intridea, Inc., released under the MIT license