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.

Designing for the Web is a web design book that will still be valid next year, which is a novelty in the genre. This is because it is not about code examples, glossy buttons or Javascript GUI-animations.

It takes a look back at the roots of graphic design and shows us why we shouldn’t throw all that knowledge away, even though “the web is not print”. Mark Boulton has a background from art- and design school, which he uses to explain the academics of typography, layout, colour theory and grids. For each theory he shows when and how this applies to the web, and even when to be crazy and break the rules to make it even better. Just make sure you learn the rules before you break them.

I really like this read since I’m already comfortable with the ins and outs of the typical front-end coding and web standards, but I have literately no education on the graphic design/art side of web design. I’ve leafed through a lot of books on the subject, even started reading a few, but none have had any connection to web design.

I recommend this book to anyone who touches any part of the design process. That includes you too, code-monkeys!

Westciv’s XRAY is a javascript bookmarklet that lets you click on items in your webpage and view some of the CSS information regarden the area you’ve selected.

Microsoft has their own IE Developer Toolbar that is similar to the Firefox Firebug plugin. It lets you inspect and alter the DOM, change settings, outline elements, find CSS etc.

That should make the bughunt slightly easier for everyone.

Update: I’m running multiple IE’s, and as a result (I assume) the webtools only work in IE7.