It is July, and you would expect most of the European countries to be on vacation somewhere sunny and hot, but we still took the time to prepare a new release for you. We have a couple of improvements that we wanted to get to you as quickly as possible.
First of all security, so far DeviceAtlas and the automated download pages have been in clear. We now have an option, if you want, to also use SSL. No changes are required on your side, if your client supports SSL, all you need to do is use https://deviceatlas.com to browse the website and https://deviceatlas.com/getJSON.php for JSON updates. So now you can verify that it’s really dotMobi that is sending you the updates.
On the API side, or better on the JSON side, we have added quite a few new user-agent strings that will improve the recognition of non-mobile user-agents. Since the beginning we had a list of “secret” properties such as isBrowser. We are now ready to announce it publicly that DeviceAtlas can reliably detect PC-browsers, but not only. If you want to know if your visitor is using a mobile device you should continue using the mobileDevice property. If you want to check if it’s someone still stuck to his desk or maybe a robot, you might want to use one of these new properties:
- isBrowser, is a desktop browser
- isChecker, is a link or site checker
- isDownloader, is a download client
- isFilter, is a proxy or content filter
- isRobot, is a robot, such as Yahoo!’s Slurp, Googlebot or botmobi
- isSpam, is an e-mail address collector or spam harvester
- isFeedReader, is a feed reader client or service like Newsgator, Google reader, etc
Feel free to test it and report if any non-mobile device is not recognised properly.
