We’ve been playing Go during lunch at work lately. Mark Lentczner, one of our engineering directors, is a long-time Go enthusiast, runs the Go center in Second Life, and has been teaching us.

So when Jens mentioned iGo for the iPhone, I bought a copy, and stayed up late one night this week working on beating the AI on a 7 x 7 board without a handicap.

I showed this the next day to Mark, who reminded me of an earlier conversation about the trouble with playing Go against an AI. Most modern Go AIs use monte carlo methods to determine their play, and the resulting style of play is nothing like a human opponent.

Instead, he suggested getting Smartgo touch. It’s a collection of a couple of thousand Go ‘problems’ to work through to improve your game.

You don’t need an AI to play Go if you’re alone, get on the KGS Go Server, and you’ll find an opponent.

The free Remote.app from Apple is nice, but I can’t convince my coworkers to let me run their iTunes remotely.

And now I have a visual explanation of what the iPhone Viewport Meta plugin does.

I found that you may need to add a thin border, via CSS, for contrast against a white background.

The set includes a Babbage Engine constructed from a Mechanno Set, my friend Peter’s iPhone controlled watering can, the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, a flying model of a Mercury Redstone rocket, and a large, menacing alien tripod.

• Now uses device-width constant instead of a value in pixels.
• Test for both iphone and ipod in user agent string.
• Switch from semi-colon to comma as separator, per ADC documentation.

James Craig has been great with pointing out bugs and changes to the viewport format, so I’m now listing him as a co-author. Thanks, James.

Update 4: Plugin now hosted at wordpress.org.

Update 3: New version with support for viewport constants, and iPod Touch.

Update 2: James Craig points out that the ID attribute is not allowed in the META element, so I’ve updated the plugin.

Update: I should add what my aim is. Rather than creating a separate template for mobile, I want to have a theme that ‘does the right thing’ for iPhone and desktop browsers.

Some documentation:

1. Plugin tests user agent string.
   • If it contains ‘iPhone’ then it adds <meta content="width=480; maximum-scale=0.6667" name="viewport"/> to the document’s head.
   • It also adds iPhone specific CSS rules. For that reason, you should call wp_head() in your theme file after you declare your default CSS files.
   • These rules were written with Sandbox in mind. You will want to edit the CSS rules to suit your theme.
   • You can force the viewport and CSS rules by adding forceiphone=y to the query string portion of a URL.
2. Adds a boolean function: weh_is_iPhone().
   • Returns true if user agent string contains ‘iPhone’.
   • You can call this function from your theme to add or turn off generation of markup.
   • Most likely you’ll use it to turn off generation of sidebars.