IPhone Cafe

A page on Apple’s iPhone developer site describes how to set a style for drop down menu’s. Apple’s on-line CSS documentation mostly uses in-line style definitions. I’m accustomed to styles defined within a STYLE tag, so I took Apple’s recommendations for the iPhone and placed then into a style called iDD (short for “iPhone Drop Down”)

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In the snippet below, iDD is defined and then it’s used as the class attribute of the select tag.

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<style TYPE=”text/css”>
.iDD { background:brown;    border: 1px dashed purple;    -webkit-border-radius:10px; }
</style>
…
<select name=”city” class=’iDD’>
   <option>choose</option>
   <option>Seattle, Wa.</option>
   <option>Washington, Dc.</option>
   <option>Dallas, Tx.</option>
   <option>Chicago, Il.</option>
   <option>New York, Ny.</option>
   <option>Miami, Fl.</option>
   <option>Baltimore, Md.</option>
</select> 

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webkit-border-radius produces a drop down that displays with rounded corners on the iPhone.

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To see iDD in action, visit the Metro Brunch page. It’s not much, but it does show brunch locations in a couple of major cities using Google Maps as the source. Below is the brunch page after selecting the rounded drop down list box.  As with any drop down, iPhone displays it’s own drop down widget which is optmized for the iPhone  Safari web interface.

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For some reason, a search of brunch sites in New York city produces results that differ between the iPhone map and a desktop browser Google map.  Only New York behaves this way. Other cities produces pretty much the same results regardless of browser type.

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Searching for “brunch” in Dallas Tx. produces a map like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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For testing purposes, the brunch page has been loaded with the following cities: Seattle, Washington, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Miami, Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Fransisco,  Oakland,  Cupertino, Memphis, Paris, London.

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The page uses a Google search parameter mrt=kmlkmz which includes User-Contributed ‘Community’ content collected from the GeoWeb

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April 17th, 2008 - Not sure why, but searching for “brunch” finds fewer locations when the search is run on an iPhone vs running on a desktop browser.  It may have something to do with user contributed content handling.  Here’s a link to another version which searches on “fine+dining”.  It seems to to a better job than the brunch search.

Fine Dining Search