Visual28-Personal Blog of Mark Aplet - Design, web, and other topics

Back in May, I wrote an article on tips for improving your web design. One small piece of that article discussed converting your design to greyscale so that you can get an idea of your color contrast ratio. Though I believe this is important to do, it is a bit time consuming when your in a design grove, and speed is of importance. Sometimes I just want a quick preview to see where I was going or how I was doing thus far in my process.

I remember seeing an online contrast analyzer and decided to look it up to see what it was about. My search turned up quite a few helpful tools that I just had to share with the rest of you. Before I get to the tools, let me take a minute to explain why we would want tools for testing contrast ratios in our designs.

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With iPhones being all the rage these days, I am wondering if mobile versions of your pages might be useful. Viewing a site on an iPhone looks exactly as it does on your desktop. This is all well and good, but sometimes pages can be bloated with images, javascript libraries, and other markup that is not as important to your visitors. I am also a bit upset that the iPhone ignores the css media type of handheld. I wish there were an option to force Safari to render handheld styles as default, but I could not find any option for it. So I set out on a quest to find some alternatives for my iPhone experience.

Coldfusion – I was sure there was a way to get something from the cgi.http_user_agent but not sure if it would just read the agent as webkit. I didn't want to kill Safari desktop users, that would be bad. The Awesome Coldfusion Jedi Ray Camden already had a solution so here it is: (Sorry for the comments around the actual code. Seams that MangoBlog wants to parse the code and run it causing an error. So remove the comments from the cfif statement to make it work. I hope to get a fix for this soon)

<!--- detect iphone --->
<!---
<cfif findNoCase("iphone", cgi.http_user_agent)>
   <cflocation url="iphone.html" addToken="false">
</cfif>
--->

Javascript, PHP, and MVC – I ran across a site called iPhone Toolbox that has a ton-o-info on developing for the iphone. (I will be spending some time here for sure.) There is a set of scripts linked up there dealing with how to detect an iPhone users that pretty much covers the rest of the developers. Here is that code

Client-side (javascript):
    if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPhone') != -1) {
       /* iPhone user */
      }
   
Server-side (example is PHP):
    if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone')) {
       /* iPhone user */
      }
   
For sites that use an MVC coding pattern where the programming logic code is separate from the template, the following example is useful:
    if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone')) {
       $template = 'home/iphone.html';
      }
      else {
       $template = 'home/index.html';
      }

If you have any other cool resources, I would love to hear about them. I did run into another site with some code to detect iPhone's and iPod's, but I couldn't make it work, so I have no idea if you have to detect them separately or not. It does speak to the reason why Apple should have an option in the settings pane to make an iPhone or iPod use a handheld stylesheet. But for now at least there is a work around.

CSS3 brings some cool new features to the web. Some features are highly discussed like rounded corners, borders, and layout control. I am really looking forward to these items becoming standard in the near future. However, I am happy that my two favorite browsers Firefox and Safari already support many of the CSS3 specs. This gives me the ability to use some lesser known items without killing my design for IE. I enjoy some of the simpler things, like the ability to change the text color and background color when text is selected on the page. IE does not currently support this but thats ok… I don't care that much for IE anyway.

Want to add this effect to your site? It's simple. Add this code to your css stylesheet.

*::-moz-selection { background:#FFFFCC; } /* FOR MOZILLA */
*::selection { background:#FFFFCC; } /* FOR SAFARI */

If you want to know more about this tag check out quirksmode.org for additional info and examples. A word of caution must be noted here, If you must validate for css level  2.1 then you will want to forgo this trick as it's not CSS2 compliant.