So we’ve recently got our hands on our very own iPad, adding to the ridiculous pile of Apple hardware in our home/business (two MacBooks, two iPods, an iPhone (two if you include the one lost in a field somewhere) a Mac Mini, an ancient eMac and a filing cabinet full of peripherals).
It’s a gorgeous bit of kit - as Mr Jobs says, it’s totally lovely to browse the web on, and Google Earth is just a joy to play with - and throws up a few interesting design and code issues too:
Another new resolution to design for. In fact, there’s two, thanks to the iPad’s magical rotating feature. Screen resolutions have been gaining width steadily for a while, and the prevailing habit has been to think of the ‘fold’ as a point at which to bury less important content; in Portrait mode, this is no more.
No more Flash navigation. Whatever your thoughts on the iOS Flash debate, it’s good to see something finally kicking this horrid habit out. If it isn’t coded, it isn’t there. No support for Flash video, either, of course: I’ll be following the lead of YouTube and using .h264 from here on.
Some interesting CSS issues. For instance, Mobile Safari doesn’t do fixed positioning: it shows you the proportion of the website which fits on screen and treats what you can see as a ‘viewpoint’. So if you’ve got something strapped to the bottom of your web page, it’s going to stay at the bottom of the page. When you scroll, you ain’t going to see it no more.
It’s pleasing to see, though, that every site I’ve worked on over the past few years works OK on iPad. That’s what standards-compliance is for…