Comments on: Mission: Impossible – iPad mini detection for HTML5

By: Kontaktannonse

Kontaktannonse — Sat, 04 May 2013 12:29:58 +0000

We wouldn’t have to be smart at all if ancient designers wouldn’t have been that stupid and using pt for font-size …
To have regards on those (imho already broken) sites is breaking sites on any coming device in future. That doesn’t make sense at all.

If cm, in and pt would be a physical unit on handheld devices everything would be fine. And that’s something devs have thought of already back in the 80ies. I think we should respect those devs – not the bad web design of the 90ies.

physical units, please. now!

By: firt

firt — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:36:58 +0000

Sure, your eyes have the same resolution if you use iPad Mini or iPad. But everything looks 19% smaller on a Mini; on some kind of apps detecting that and applying a different font size is necessary.

By: tecmobeto

tecmobeto — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:33:59 +0000

Have you asked yourself the question why you need to actually check if it’s an iPad Mini though ?

By: Vaggelis Tsikalas

Vaggelis Tsikalas — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:56:42 +0000

My guess is that Apple wouldn’t want you to make exceptions for iPad mini compared to iPad, and nor would I, had I bought one.

The iPad mini is for those with smaller fingers and better eyesight than those who prefer the big iPad. Apple uses the same screen resolution as in the iPad 2 and didn’t bother to change anything in the UI, (thus making everything about 20% smaller) considering it’s not such a big deal for the mini buyer.

The iPad mini user eventually gets used to this zoom level (actually, i’d much prefer to have this zoom level on my big iPad, fitting more info on screen), and it would look awkward to suddenly be presented with something relatively bigger.

By: firt

firt — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:05:48 +0000

Thanks. It seems like a bug because both values are incorrect. The problem is that with 6.1 (in beta now) the bug may be “solved” :S

By: Kaspars

Kaspars — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:55:23 +0000

I just discovered that screen.availWidth and screen.availHeight are different for iPad Mini and iPad 2.

Here is the blog post: http://konstruktors.com/blog/web-design/4396-detect-ipad-mini-javascript/

By: Michael Trenkler

Michael Trenkler — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:12:51 +0000

@Orion
We wouldn’t have to be smart at all if ancient designers wouldn’t have been that stupid and using pt for font-size …
To have regards on those (imho already broken) sites is breaking sites on any coming device in future. That doesn’t make sense at all.

physical units, please. now!

read: http://smus.com/physical-units/

By: Brett Jankord

Brett Jankord — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:09:43 +0000

You could always take a page from Jeffrey Zeldman, and just increase your default font-size for all devices. http://www.zeldman.com/ Simple and easy fix.

By: Orion

Orion — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:33:54 +0000

In my experience, web designers try to do too much to “figure out” what machine they’re running on. I often turn my iPhone to landscape to read a website because that increases the size of the text. But some sites that detect orientation will keep the text the same size when you switch to landscape and simply put more words on each line! These same sites will usually disable tap zoom, so you can’t even increase the font size that way.

Why not try to be less “smart” and just put a font scale button on the page. Give the user two sizes to choose from and make both sizes layout really nicely. So I can see text more clearly on my iPad Mini, but get better information density on my larger tablet?

I think by not trying to outsmart the user you’ll get a friendlier result

By: Edward O'Connor

Edward O'Connor — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:58:52 +0000

Err, the commenting stripped out some essential content. That should read:

CSS resolution units are “physical dots per CSS length“, and CSS lengths are in terms of CSS pixels, not device pixels.