Although I’ve owned an iPhone for over a year, and use it extensively to browse the web, up to now I have not really put much effort into optimizing the interfaces of my own websites to suit Mobile Safari. But with some client projects requiring an iPhone-optimized interface looming on the horizon, it seemed like good practice to work on it here.

For the most part, the regular interface for this site works just fine on an iPhone, but with the body content inside an internally-scrolling block, and no scrolling on the page itself, it seems impossible to read these pages in the iPhone’s interface. I learned, quite by accident, while preparing this new version, that in fact the iPhone can scroll internal blocks with the same two-finger scrolling technique that works on MacBook trackpads, but there’s no intuitive indicator that this is possible. In short, and not to seem a braggart, but if I couldn’t figure it out, I can’t expect many other iPhone users to know about it either.

Essentially, I’ve squeezed the general look-and-feel down to something that is better suited to a 320×480 screen, without needing to scale the page. Scrolling is still a major issue, and I may introduce pagination on the Thesis page to make that a bit more manageable.

The good news is that you can upgrade. It’s free, and easy. Just run Windows Update to get Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s web browser. It has excellent support for current web standards and is much more secure.

An even better option is to download Firefox. It’s free, it’s secure, and it supports a lot of cutting edge features that IE8 doesn’t. Get Firefox now…