That Norwegian Guy

Just tried Padpressed on the iPad. Seems like an awesome idea, I was very wowed be the Youtube videos on the site. So I went ahead and tried the demo on my iPad. (Don’t bother trying in desktop Safari, the designs are completely different.)

First impression

I’m sad to say that the demo felt a bit to much like a beta version. It tries so hard to behave like a native iPad, and it gets about 80% there. Which makes it a bit weird, odd, or uncomfortable to use. The iPad uncanny valley.

The article links seem to trigger a little bit to fast on the scrolling of the articles on the homepage. It’s like the scrolling sensor is competing with the anchor sensor and the wrong one wins. I ended up in articles repetedly when I was attempting to scroll.

Once in the article itself I wasn’t allowed to scroll all the way to the bottom. And it allowed sideways scrolling, even though it didn’t need it, so I ended up scrolling diagonally by mistake.

Second impression

Wrong. I just tried again, and realised the sideways swiping is for going to the next article. Just like it says on the website.  Playing around with it for a bit makes it easier to use. But I don’t think it’s ripe for a typical client website, unless the business has a very specific demographic. For something that has a lot of returning users, e.g. a web-app, it could work better.

Just a bit more than a Tweet after 3 minutes of use.

Aside

It won’t hurt to know a little bit about what to consider when designing and developing for the iPad before you just whack a plug-in in to take care of it for you. This article, Designing web apps for iPad, at Six Revisions seems helpful. I haven’t read it, but consider it Instapapered.

Tags:   iPad · webdesign · wordpressNo Comments