Mobile format tweak

The HAWHAW library used for our Hawpedia-based mobile gateway does this cute thing where on a “grown-up” web browser it squishes the formatted output into a tiny rectangle, with a cute picture of a mobile phone around it.

This “simulator” mode makes it … sort of… look like an actual mobile device. But IMHO this causes more harm than good. Two main problems:

  • Unrecognized devices can end up being shown the simulator skin, often horribly misrendering it (like the Palm Treo at right — hopefully recognized since a few weeks ago)
  • It’s harder to actually get a feel for the variety of behavior on devices with different screen sizes. There’s everything out there from the tiniest cell phone to the iPhone to the Amazon Kindle reader’s big ol’ 6″ screen. There’s no way to resize the tiny rectangle, so you can’t estimate how things are going to feel on the medium screens.

I’ve now disabled this. With the simulator / “big screen” mode off, regular web browsers and unrecognized devices get pretty much the same output style that you see in things like the iPhone. It’s reasonably clean, and will properly scale and wrap with your screen size.