Benjamin-Newton Creative Works: General Help for Apple iPad Tablet

General Information

Apple has released the first generation of a new tablet device that looks a lot like a giant iPhone or iPod Touch (without the phone). It has a 10 inch screen, inch thick, 1.5 lbs, battery lasts 10 hours, and sells for $500. An iPad runs most of the same underlying software as the iPhone and iPod Touch, although the interface is evolved for the larger screen. You use your fingers to navigate the device, like the iPhone and iPod Touch. But there are some differences in software availability and the resolution and size of the screen changes things as well.

It connects via WiFi, so it will work on any wireless network like a hotspot, a wireless network at a school or office, and on your home wireless network (without any additional software, hardware, services, or contracts). I live in a medium size city and there are about 10 free hotspots, within a couple blocks of my apartment, that work perfectly, with my iPad. The battery lasts forever, as the 10 hour battery life is measured, for playing 10 hours of video. The machine turns on and off instantly. It is 10x easier to use than any other computer you have used, even if you are a Mac user.

My Website Compatibility

The iPad supports a high enough resolution and is physically big enough to browse my full website (and the parts that were just in Flash now also work in Javascript and on the iPhone, so they will work on the iPad), so the main website will work, with all the bells an whistles, so to speak and will support an ultimate browsing experience. The iPad will be able to detect what direction you have it turned, either landscape or portrait, and web pages and apps will adapt to the different orientation, so you can have it oriented like a book or for watching a movie, depending on the activity, just like with the iPhone.

The Apple iPad Tablet (with iOS 4.2) allows for a whole new fully immersive experience beyond just the new font and built in audio. The iPad browser will provide stunning visual effects involving high impact graphics shapes, light and shadow, and conditional formatting tricks, like: angled rounded corners on images, headings, quotes pages, and select paragraphs; image, page, quote rotation; text drop shadows on headings; drop shadows on images, quotes, select paragraphs; stylized drop caps for quotes; alternating colors for featured links; featured links going to a different website, going to another one of my websites, and on the same page marked as such; featured links to zip files marked as such; faded featured previously visited links; and background gradients. This is all done without any plugins (including Flash Player), without any additional graphics or slower download times, it keeps the website just as accessible as before, and only needs to be edited in one place to change or update the entire website.

Special Instructions for Apple iPad Tablet Users

There are some differences in the web browser, for the iPad, that do not apply, to the same browser (Safari), on Mac OS X.

One of these differences is that the custom web page fonts are done differently, so there was some trouble getting all the text, to display correctly, due to a bug specific to the iPad and maybe the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well. This seems to only affect the descriptions of the different file formats, that are listed, on my book pages, and I have applied some tricks, to get it to work, but it is not ideal.

My website looks good in both the landscape and portrait orientations, but the formatting will change, if you rotate it (this was designed by me to do that).

Another issue is that the interactivity is slow, when using holding the iPad in landscape orientation, so if you click on something, that is supposed to have something else appear, when clicked, then click a little lower (because the center of the image is lower, but not visible, because I am using transparency) and give it a second, to respond.

Other iPad Web Browsers

The same company, that makes the Opera web browser, for desktop computers, like laptops and desktops (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) makes a totally unrelated web browser, for phones, called Opera Mini. Although the Opera web browser is an advanced browser, that used to display my website fine, until the latest version, that now makes my websites text unreadable, Opera Mini is a much simpler browser, that takes less memory. Opera Mini decides what part of the website it wants to do correctly and which parts it thinks it knows better, than the web designer, so you can get very unpredictable results.

Opera Mini's main market is for those with really slow connections and/or very slow/cheap smart phones and the increased speed comes, from increasing the compression, of images, so that they are unreadable. Basically, Opera Mini is not in the same league, as the default browsers, in Apple's and other leading smartphone vendor's products, but it will not accept the standard way of targeting this kind of less capable browser, either because it thinks too few web designers make use of this feature, or because they want to claim, that it is more powerful, than it really is.

My main website works great on the default settings with Opera Mini 6 for iPad. You will see my failsafe mode only, and without the custom fonts, but it looks great and works fine. On the Opera Mini 6 for iPhone and iPod Touch, the main website doesn't look like it is supposed to nor is it attractive, but it does work fine, if you set the settings to what I recommend, on the mobile website help section, although I cannot guarantee it will work, if and when I make any design changes. Opera Mini on iPhone and iPod Touch will work, on my mobile website version, as well any other Opera Mini 6, on other phones.

Most other third party browsers, available in the Apple App Store, should work fine with my website, as they use the same software, to display websites with, but, as of the latest current version, of iOS (4.3), the default Safari Mobile browser will give you substantially better Javascript performance, which is usually what slows down your web browsing the most.

Apple iWork Office Suite

Another additional application that is available for the iPad is Apple's iWork office suite, which includes a Word Processor/Page Layout application, a Presentation program, and a Spreadsheet application. The main strength of Apple's iWork is its quality of graphics and its ease of use. The iPad version will have most the features of the desktop version and will have the same file formats, but the cost is $10 an application, so it is about 1/3 the price of the desktop version. The interface will be significantly different. You can view my Word Processor Versions of my texts in iWork on the iPad. The Mac OS X versions of iWork offer more options than the ones on the iPad, so if you are exchanging files back in forth, you will likely lose formatting (but not data/information).

Other Applications and Add-ons

Most of the third party App Store applications should be available soon for the device. Most iPhone specific apps will work on the iPad, but they only appear in a little window in the center of the iPad, as big as the iPhone and you can double the size, if you hit the 2x option on the side, but the text then appears blurry. Most iPad applications cost $5 or less and many are free. There is already a wireless keyboard, digital camera cable connector, and cover accessories and a drawing program. You can also expand the memory on your iPad, by using an SD memory card (one of the types of memory, commonly used in digital cameras) and you can also print, from the iPad, to wireless printers. There is also at least one third party application that will allow you to print from almost any printer attached to your computer if you have a wireless network shared with the computer connected to the printer.

You don't need a credit card, to buy software, for the iPad, from iTunes, or buy, from the iBook store, from your iPad. The iTunes gift cards, that come in denominations of $15, $25, and $50, can be used to purchase iPad apps and iBook books, in addition to music, audio books, and videos. You can buy these iTunes gift cards, at your local: Apple store, Mac store, grocery store, or most other stores that stock third party gift cards. You just click on "redeem", in the upper right corner of the iTunes store, and enter the code, on the card, after you scratch of the silver covering, with a coin (like lottery cards).

Device Testing

I have already tested this site on the first generation of the new iPad device (with iOS 4.2) and have it optimized.

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