This post all stemmed from the monthly arrival of .Net magazine (aka Practical Web Design outside the UK) in which the key feature was “Designing for the iPad”. I initially tweeted:
Latest issue of .Net just arrived. Main feature? Designing for the iPad. *sigh*.
And then I tweeted this:
Is designing for the iPad that important at this stage? I would have to say absolutely not. Think an entire feature on it is pointless.
Which got a reaction (a good one) from Rob Hawkes with a few tweets, all with valid points:
I’d have to disagree with you there @Jack_Franklin. Designing for touch screen devices is incredibly important right now.
In fact, it’s the most important skill Web developers need to learn. Touch is the future and current sites are shit. /cc @Jack_Franklin
@Jack_Franklin The thing is it’s a different experience to that of your iPhones and Androids so I believe it deserves separate attention.
So I promised to attempt to pull together some form of words to form this blog post. But I’m not sure where to go with it - the title was more of a stupid pun then my actual thoughts. This is how I see it. I’m sure you may well disagree or meet me half way or hate me, whatever.
The iPhone revolutionised the way mobile users browse devices. I’m pretty sure we will all agree on that. For the first time we had a mobile web browser that just displayed most pages in the very same way as on this laptop, and any laptop. It gave a unique experience, a mostly good experience. Of course, some websites were not fully optimised for this new way of browsing - and since then we’ve seen the iPhone become more popular, 2G, 3G, 3GS and soon the iPhone 4. Which has had 10x as many pre-orders as the iPhone 3GS. And now of course, we have the iPad.
The iPad. Undoubted this offers a completely different browsing experience to the iPhone, and I’ve played with one a few times myself. But do we need to actually think more and more about the iPad - not just the iPad, I imagine other competitors will now evolve into something that can offer something on a similar level - but again, presuming they follow the Apple way and use Webkit to display sites similarly.
Rob argued, validly, that we need to think about the iPad (note - I say iPad but from now on I really mean iPad + similar devices), but I’m inclined to disagree. I think that most websites that I ever visit on my iPod Touch work absolutely fine - and whilst the few sites I’ve quickly tried on an iPad have also displayed perfectly, I admit I can’t provide any hard evidence. However, my only point with this is that not a lot is different enough to warrant a large amount of effort into making it work flawlessly on an iPad. The main issue for me is the lack of a however, you can’t hover on a touch screen. Things like dropdowns that show on hover, or any functions such as “Hover here to find out more” do need to be looked at. However I don’t think it’s essential - you would need to look at the target audience in my opinion (although, if you’re showing lots of things on hover, you’re doing it wrong) and perhaps I would change it to “click here to show XYZ” rather than “hover here”.
But I honestly don’t see anything else particular. I’m probably being arrogant and single minded, so feel free to prove me wrong :)
