The MobileESP Project: Easily detect mobile web site visitors

James Mehorter has kindly supported MobileESP in the past and helped identify a couple of holes in the MobileESP detection code (usually around random BlackBerry devices). (And yes, we’ve added some of them to our official new useragent test list.)

Well, James has published a mobile device detection plugin for WordPress using MobileESP. From the official description:

“Device Theme Switcher” by James Mehorter uses MobileESP to let theme developers and website administrators select which WordPress theme is delivered to Handheld devices, and which theme is delivered to tablet devices, while still showing the primary theme to computer users.  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/device-theme-switcher/ 

Thanks for your hard work on that project, James! Those are good download numbers, too. The last time I looked, the plugin had around 5,000 downloads.

Hi, folks –

The community has delivered another great port of MobileESP! Jury Gerasimov sent me an email last week with the good news.

Jury’s company in Irkutsk, Russia, (that’s one of the largest cities in Siberia!) has been developing a bus monitoring service. The web site was built in Python for the Django web app framework. In Jury’s own words:

We’ve made 3 versions of the web interface – desktop, modern mobile and old mobile – available on the same URL. To detect which version the server should display, we needed some server-side script, and MobileESP has the most usable set of functions among other solutions. Our main developers were quite busy, so Python translation was made by freelance guy. He knew the code will be opened so kept the structure and comments close to original.

Check out the mobile version of their bus tracking web app: www.irk.fm/bus/ (Note that the web site is in Russian naturally.)

For you Python lovers, here is the sample code they used to integrate MobileESP in Django. It looks pretty simple…

  from mobileesp import mdetect

  user_agent = request.META.get("HTTP_USER_AGENT")
  http_accept = request.META.get("HTTP_ACCEPT")
  if user_agent and http_accept:
       agent = mdetect.UAgentInfo(userAgent=user_agent, httpAccept=http_accept)
       #Do first! For iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, etc.
       if agent.detectTierIphone():
           HttpResponseRedirect('/myapp/i/')
       #Then catch all other mobile devices
       if agent.detectMobileQuick():
           HttpResponseRedirect('/myapp/m/')
  #For traditional computers and tablets (iPad, Android, etc.)
  return HttpResponseRedirect('/myapp/d/')  

Moving forward, we will be hosting the Python codebase in the MobileESP project on Google Code. (See the Download Page for details.) Jury and his team will assist in reviewing and testing updates.

For more information about the Python port or to contact Jury for more information about his company’s services, please email Jury directly: jury@softshape.com.

Cheers,

Anthony

Hi, folks –

I’ve been remiss in sharing this good news…

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Miguel Barrero that he has ported MobileESP to Classic ASP — which means classic VBscript. So for you folks who work at places still using Classic ASP to pump out the pages, you can now also detect and optimize your web sites for mobile devices! Who says the iPhone and Android can’t get all snuggly with VBscript??  :-)

To download your copy of MobileESP for Classic ASP (VBscript), point your browser to:

https://bitbucket.org/mbarrero/mobileesp-classic-asp

Please note that Miguel is maintaining the Classic ASP code in his spare time, so the VBscript library may be a little bit behind changes made to the main MobileESP code libraries.

Thanks again, Miguel!

Hi, folks –

We recently received an email from Rumen Dmitrov who told us how he’s using MobileESP in his commercial project…

“I use MobileESP as an essential part of my new project called OpenCart Mobile Framework http://bit.ly/rxJ8Ot. MobileESP cares for the automatic mobile device detection which I use to redirect visitors to a dedicated mobile theme. This helps me have separate mobile and desktop page templates which increases the speed of any OpenCart store by 2700% when accessed on mobile.

“I knew I had to find a way to detect devices on the server, and not through media queries, because the mobile-first approach starts on the server. If I had thought otherwise the mobile visitors would have been burdened by having to download 500k of useless (on mobiles) data and having to reformat it.”

We would like to showcase more projects using MobileESP. Please send me (Anthony) an email about how your project is using MobileESP, and we’ll post a note here on the blog!

Cheers,

Anthony

The good folks at Weever recently sent us a note letting us know that they have ported MobileESP to a Joomla plug-in called (appropriately enough) “MobileESP for Joomla.” Fantastic!

Feel free to download the latest version of MobileESP for Joomla direct from the github repository, though it will be available directly in the Joomla Extensions Directory.

https://github.com/WeeverApps/plg_mobileesp

(Please note for various reasons that MobileESP for Joomla uses the GPLv3 license, in case it would be an issue of concern for you.)

The Weever folks also kindly added a new method for detecting the jailbroken Apple TV 2 device, which will be integrated into a future update of MobileESP. Thanks, guys!

To learn more about the MobileESP for Joomla plugin, please read their post in their Weever Labs blog:

http://weeverapps.com/labs/item/110-mobileesp-for-joomla

Thanks for bringing the goodness of MobileESP to Joomla, Weever!

- Anthony

P.S.

Weever provides a service that turns almost any web site into a mobile app for the major smartphone platforms. Check ‘em out!

One of the web developers using MobileESP has ported the code library to Ruby. How cool is that?!?

If you’re a Ruby enthusiast, you can download the latest version of MobileESP from GitHub at:

https://github.com/eimermusic/mobileesp

Martin has made a few tweaks to the code library to better match Ruby programming patterns. One of the cool Ruby-esque things he’s done is provide aliases to the function names. So for example, the “DetectXXX” function also has an “is_XXX” alias.

We’re grateful for Martin’s contribution to expanding the MobileESP platform coverage and his ongoing maintenance of the Ruby codebase.

Thanks a ton for taking the initiative on this, Martin!