I lost my cellphone last night, which sucks because the phone I want isn't going to be available until July 11th. I'll get a loaner phone until then, but it is exciting times to be a web developer. Why? Because the introduction of the iPhone there is a renewed interest in web sites that cope well with mobile browsing. I'm working on an app that is perfect for mobile browsing, but that is still down the road.

Anyhow, I saw a post the other day showing how to create an iPhone-optimized version of your Symfony app. Yawn. Cake had that a year ago.. No code provided *but* the article does tell you exactly how he did it.

But that's really the key here. You don't need to do anything special to make a web-based app in CakePHP that will work nicely on your iPhone. Contrast that to all the stuff I see in that article that you need to do. Off the top of my head, it seems to me the best way to do it is:

• create CSS and layouts for regular and iPhone versions of your application
• do a check in your beforeFilter() method where you check the User-Agent
• pass that info to your actions, and render whichever layout+CSS you need

Compare the Symfony article to the CakePHP article plus my notes, and let me know what you think.