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Web Design for Apple iPad
Most of the people have already heard about new iPad from Apple’s announcement recently. Apple iPad is designed to browse web pages, check emails, enjoy and share photos, watch videos, play music, find maps, read ebooks, and many more things to do. Although Apple is obviously saying iPad is the best way to experience the web (see it on features page), there is a big downside of not supporting Adobe’s free Flash plugin in its Safari web browser. This means you cannot see all web contents and even big websites like CNN and BBC are having Flash contents. You will need to think about it before you buy one. If you want to browse flash websites, you may buy a netbook instead of iPad.
Web designers need to be very careful about this when designing web pages specifically for iPad. The screen size is 9.7 inches diagonal and the resolution is 1024×768 on iPad which is another factor for you to consider when designing web pages for iPad.
Initial Apple’s iPad promotional video had a mistake of displaying a flash video player on a web page of NYTimes.com website opening in iPad’s Safari web browser. Later on, Apple updated the video on their website by displaying a blue lego in the area of flash content. However, you can still see it in YouTube video shown below when showing up New York Times website.
Here is a screenshot of the updated video on Apple’s website which does not show up a flash video player anymore.
The New York Times website has a flash video player shown below.
Hopefully, there will be similar competing devices (from other top brands) supporting Adobe’s Flash plugin for browsing flash websites and flash contents.
I’m not really sure why they went down this path (ie, no Flash)…. The Ipad seems ideally suited for playing video on the move… and Flash is a dominant force in that area.
Anyway, designing specifficaly for iPad wont be necessary I think. 1024 looks… mhm… may be not “fine” but enough.
The flash software/plug-in is a joke. Its bloated and 9/10 times its what has caused my browser to crash. I’ll be glad to see the end of it. HTML5 is the future and thankfully we’ll finally get away from Adobe’s junk programming. Websites are now programming for HTML5 and the iPad is well placed to take advantage of it.
Can’t wait for my iPad, great post though!
I¡¯m really to be finally posting online after all these years. There really is no mystery about it, is there? I just dropped by your blog and had to write. I¡¯m a recent college grad, journalism major if you must know, and I absolutely love the art of photography. I¡¯ve got my website up but it¡¯s nothing to brag about yet. None of my stuff¡¯s been posted. Soon as I figure out how to do that, I¡¯ll spend the day posting my best pictures. anyway just thought I¡¯d drop a line. I hope to return with more substantial stuff, stuff you can actually use. SPG
For those of you who have not yet understood why they didn’t put flash in iPad, flash requires a large amount of resources including memory, cpu, gpu and others. For portable devices this is not good especially for Apple which has to show they can make their products last (I’m talking about battery here). If they had put flash into iPad it would have needed a recharge very often due to excessive use of resources. There is another reason and that is flash is an old technology now and apart from that it has also many security holes. HTML5 instead is very reliable, secure, new tech and so on. Anyway my opinion is that the iPad is expensive and useless.