"There's an app for that!"

On my Android phone the default browser (others are available) works perfectly for using this site. iPhone marketing seems to want users to download an separate application in order to access each online service. Are none of the web browsers available sufficient for accessing this site?

You can pull up the web site on the iPhone. But you'll have to zoom in to ensure that you click the correct link for the log in or any other link. It's a bit aggravating having to zoom in and out on the browser to be able to read and/or click the correct links.

As for other browsers on the iPhone, you'll have to jailbreak it in order to get something else. Apple won't let you sell an app in its iTunes store if the app's functionality already exists with the default Apple software. (I believe that this is the reason why Apple blocked Google Voice from being released.) Since Apple includes the Safari browser, I don't think that they would allow another browser to be installed. Of course, I could be totally wrong.

"You can pull up the web site on the iPhone. But you'll have to zoom in to ensure that you click the correct link for the log in or any other link. It's a bit aggravating having to zoom in and out on the browser to be able to read and/or click the correct links."

Don't you have to zoom in to most pages, given that, IMHO, most sites aren't optimised for mobile devices? <joke>Who'd have thought the Apple marketing machine would mislead us into thinking their mobile browsing experience was as smooth as shown on TV!</joke>. For me a tap of the screen zooms in (percentage zoom is configurable of course) and the page is rendered so that I can easily read the text should I need to. Clicking links/voting isn't a problem even when I'm not zoomed in.

"As for other browsers on the iPhone, you'll have to jailbreak it in order to get something else."

I'm sure Opera is available for the iPhone without jailbreak. For me this is another win for the Android platform. Install what you like, it's your device.

For the record, I'm using Cyanogem mod. Heck, someone has even ported Android to the iphone.

Update: added "without jailbreak".

As I mentioned in 858397, the rule is that all browsers have to use the WebKit rendering engine (and the appropriate APIs, etc.). There are several browsers available on the iPhone. I think Opera Mini was approved because it's not actually HTTP between the client and their special proxy server (they developed their own protocol to send the content to Opera Mini).

Elda Taluta; Sarks Sark; Ark Arks

Sounds like an interesting task, just for doing it. However I doubt I will ever use it:

• As others, I hate the idea having a dedicated app for each website I visit ... Safari is working good enough for most pages
• More important, I use perlmonks mainly when working at my PC. Before posting, I verify the code on the PC. And if I see some interesting code, I copy&paste it to my development environment. If I would surf PerlMonks via iPhone, I would loose that possibility ...

You don't need Objective C: ISBN 9780596805784. HTML5 + CSS can do apps that look and behave as native.

That does sound interesting. However, an iPhone app would only work on the iPhone OS. I think a better initial approach may be to get a mobile web version of the PerlMonks web site created, which would be more cross-platform compatible for more mobile devices. Of course, I admit that the mobile web version of the site is probably much easier to say than to implement.

If you're willing to shell out the money for the iPhone SDK stuff from Apple and to develop something, I'd definitely would be interested in checking it out while I still have an iPhone. (I'm planning to switch to an Android based phone next summer.)