ciUI layout for other mobile phones

[pixelwiz]

So we just started thinking about building some WebApps for the
iPhone, and I've started working on my first one. I actually tried
several different frameworks iUI, ciUI and WebApp.Net. WebApp.Net
looked most like the standard iPhone apps. But all that aside, my
collegues and I started thinking, is it really a good idea to just do
an iPhone only app for us, or would it be better to build a site that
would work equally well on various mobile devices, most importantly
Blackberry (since almost everyone here has one).

So I'm back to the drawing board, and what I am trying to figure out
if I should try to take the visual elements of the iPhone and re-use
them to construct an app that would work on all the devices, or if I
should build something completely from scratch just using big buttons
and lists that would be easy to use on any mobile device.

Is there any way to use ciUI or other iPhone frameworks with other
mobile devices?

[Vladimir Olexa]

usually, the way this is done (at least on our sites) is that you have
separate mobile initiatives for separate devices. you pretty much
build up your model on the backend and simply feed it to a series of
templates, each optimized for a different device. i don't know of any
of "do-it-all" framework that would mimic various environments. mobile
browsers are, unfortunately, so distinct at the moment each of them is
its own use case.

on the desktop side, there is a plethora of JS frameworks that tackle
browser incompatibilities (mootools, prototype, dojo, YUI, etc). i'm
not sure to what extent they consider the mobile market though.

having said that, CiUI and iUI were made specifically for mobile
Safari. they will probably work fine on the Android-powered phones as
well. i can only speak for CiUI here and we're definitely not going to
support anything but mobile Safari (or any other Webkit-based
browser).

as far as various native iPhone GUI elements go, my thinking was that
people will not want to use the default graphics anyway, so why bother
creating them in the first place. every site wants to have a unique
look and feel, that is why i tried to accomplish customization in as
few steps as possible. if you look at the CSS required to run CiUI
you'll see it's very short. that was one my personal requirements to
make it that way.

all of these frameworks accomplish pretty much the same thing, we just
do it differently. i haven't looked at the WebApp code yet but it
seems like it includes a pretty comprehensive library of elements,
which means it's probably a lot heavier than CiUI. there is nothing
wrong with that, we just try to accomplish different things.