Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it.

Though it's not widely known, you can write native-feeling iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad in JavaScript (+ HTML and CSS).

In this article, I'll explain how to:

strip away the browser chrome (the url bar and button bar);
prevent viewport scrolling and scaling;
respond to multi-touch and gesture events;
use webkit CSS to get the iPhone OS look and feel;
cache the app so it runs without internet access;
get a custom icon on the home screen; and
have a splash screen load at the start.

Cut the Rope is an immediate favorite for anyone who plays it. It’s as fun as it is adorable. So we had an idea: let’s make this great game available to an even bigger audience by offering it on the web using the power of HTML5.

To do this, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab (the creators of the game) and the specialists at Pixel Lab to bring Cut the Rope to life in a browser. The end result is an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts.

You can play the HTML5 version of Cut the Rope at: www.cuttherope.ie.

Casey’s Contraptions came out for iPad only in May. Since then, you and your partner in crime have been working on making it run on the iPhone. That’s 3 months for those of you counting. So what has taken this long? Wasn’t it a straight port? Lots of shared code? Just shrink the images and go? Well…

iMirror - AR case for sunglasses manufacturer via iPad

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

If this (i)Pawn app from Volumique turns out to be real, it could really change the way some games are played on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. The game, which is supposed to be available sometime in November, uses a set of physical playing pieces, or tokens, that actually interact with the touchscreen. Now we’ve already seen iPhone-friendly styluses, so that’s nothing new, but what’s really intriguing here is how the app is able to recognize the individual playing pieces.

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

Unlike most desktop browsers, the Safari browser of your iOS device doesn’t support extensions but you can still add extra functionality to the browser with the help of bookmarklets. These are single-line codes that look like regular bookmarks but slightly more intelligent as they can help you translate sites, find word meanings, make pages more readable and so on – all with a single click.

Das Besondere an Berliner Zeiten* ist jedoch, dass das Magazin nicht nur für das iPad, sondern auch auf dem iPad erstellt wird. Eine spezielle Produktions-Anwendung mach es möglich, dass dabei das Layout mitsamt Überschriften, Unterzeilen und Texten auf dem Touchscreen eingegeben und mit zwei Fingern in der Größe angepasst werden kann. Dafür hat die B.Z. mit dem IT-Entwickler Markus Glasmeier zusammengearbeitet, der momentan auch an einem neuen System zum Verwalten und Veröffentlichen von mobilen Inhalten arbeitet. Die Anwendung eXPublica erlaubt es, Magazine, Tageszeitungen oder Bücher flexibel zu layouten und für verschiedene Endgeräte zu publizieren. Das System soll in Kürze erscheinen und zunächst für iPhone, iPod und iPad verfügbar sein.

Geradezu euphorisch erzählt Springer-Boss Mathias Döpfner derzeit immer wieder, dass Paid-Content-Modelle dank iPhone und iPad endlich funktionieren würden. Die ePaper der verlagseigenen Print-Objekte kann er damit nicht meinen. Denn: Aktuelle Zahlen der IVW zeigen, wie schwach sich Bild, Welt, BamS & Co. auf elektronischem Wege derzeit verkaufen. Alle Springer-Zeitungen und -Zeitschriften verfügen als ePaper demnach nur über dreistellige Abonnentenzahlen.

Aircraft-grade aluminum with a bead-blasted, anodized finish that matches the iPad
Military grade high-density padding for superior drop protection
Innovative hinge provides ten angles for viewing and typing in both portrait and landscape mode (non-keyboard version only)
Stylish, thin and lightweight. Half as thin as most folios for the iPad
Large, flat base allows for use on a soft or uneven surface such as a lap or on a bed
Only adds about 1/8 of an inch to the iPad

According to a new report from Women’s Wear Daily, digital magazine sales are on the decline. A closer look at the data, however, reveals that sales are not nearly as bad as they appear.

The report, which cites numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, points out that magazine sales on the iPhone and iPad are down across the board.

I read a great article in the Economist the other day on my iPad. I tried to share it with my social network on Facebook and Twitter, but I can't do that with old media.

When the iPad came out, I was ready to give big media another chance. I thought they might wake up and start exploring new products and business models. I thought they might explore how to integrate with the modern Internet, the distributed and syndicated content model, and the social ecosystem. Then the apps came out. It was all the same - a proliferation of branded channels.

One of my first icon projects for Campaign Monitor was to create a set of Apple iOS icons for our mobile web application. These are the icons that show up when you bookmark our mobile site to the ‘home screen’ on your Apple device. Now, with all of the iOS devices floating around out there, you can do things the easy way by creating one large icon which is then scaled down for that particular device, or you can do it properly by creating a pixel-perfect icon for each device. For the iPod Touch/iPhone 2.5/3G/3GS, the icon size is a miserly 57 pixels square. For the iPad, it’s 72 pixels square, and for the newer iPhone4, it’s a whopping 114 pixels square.

I created a web-based iPad app mainly for my own personal use. I got fed up with the App Store and all the paid apps that didn’t do the trick.

My particular project is a news aggregating app that makes it easy to take 5 minutes every couple hours and keep up-to-date on news stories from a variety of sources.

You’ve been depressed for like a year now, I know. All the hardcore Objective-C developers have been having a hay-day writing apps for the iPhone. You might have even tried reading a tutorial or two about developing for the iPhone, but its C—or a form of it—and it’s really hard to learn.

Magazine sollten eigentlich ein Hit auf dem iPad werden: Das iPad ist groß, der Bildschirm farbig und die Multimedia-Fähigkeiten des Geräts eröffnen neue Möglichkeiten. Zumindest TIME Inc. ist aber frustriert [1] - der Verlag will, darf aber keine Abos verkaufen.

Der digitale Wandel von Print zu Online nimmt immer mehr Fahrt auf. Wie eine aktuelle Umfrage von Qmags unter 170.000 Lesern zeigt, erfreuen sich digital aufbereitete Inhalte zunehmender Beliebtheit. Klarer Verlierer sind in diesem Fall die klassischen Print-Medien. Die Gründe für die Verschiebung dürften auf der Hand liegen. So sind digitale Inhalte früher verfügbar, können leichter archiviert werden, schonen die Umwelt und können zudem besser durchsucht werden. Interessant ist auch, was die Leser über diese Publikationsform denken. Demnach ist die überwiegend Mehrheit der Leser entweder zufrieden oder sehr zufrieden mit der Art, wie die Inhalte präsentiert werden. In Anbetracht dessen, dass viele Magazine und Zeitungen auf dem iPad eine 1:1-Umsetzung der Print-Inhalte darstellen und häufig ganz auf interaktive Darstellungsmöglichkeiten verzichten, ist dieses Ergebnis meiner Meinung nach doch etwas verwunderlich.

Three million iPads have been sold in 80 days, Apple has announced. The tablet device launched in the US on April 3 and internationally on May 28. Apple said that developers have created over 11,000 new apps for iPad, which is also capable of running “almost all” of the 225,000 apps on the App Store. “People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “We’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world.”

Wird das iPad als Lesegerät von den Konsumenten angenommen? Diese Frage beschäftigt Land auf Land ab die Medienbranche. Doch die Antwort hängt wesentlich davon ab, wie Medienhäuser das iPad bespielen werden.

First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (”interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again.

Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects: Two news applications, a social network and a word processor. We worked on iPad projects without ever having touched an iPad. One client asked us to “start working on that tablet thing” even before we knew whether the iPad was real. The question Are we designing desktop programs, web sites or something entirely new? has been torturing us until that express package from New York finally crossed our door sill. A quick write up of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at our office.

iPad web apps are websites that are optimized for the multi-touch device. This page is constantly updated with the best iPad web apps available. Is there a great web app that we missed? Please contact us and let us know.

Apple iPad applications are often confusing for users and need more consistent features to be successful, according to Jakob Nielsen, one of the internet’s leading experts in usability.

About a month ago or so, Amy and I release a little (literally, it’s about 5k) HTML5 iPad App for looking up time zones. I don’t mean select-box wasteland like all other time zone sites (who likes select boxes anyway?!), I mean a nicely polished, touch-enabled UI that works offline, too.