Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
why an iPad specific site when from what i've heard from iPad users have no problem viewing regular websites?
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I read multiple articles on the need to make an iPad specific site, there are lots of reasons, but the video compatibility is the top concern. The other concern is to provide an optimized experience for our growing mobile audience, mainly on the issue of touch navigation. Here is what I turned in for our press release on the same question asked by our press guy:
What makes the iPad version of David Nudes different from the standard
website?
Designing a website to function on a fixed screen size with a touch
interface requires a completely new layout. Buttons need to be bigger,
so you can easily touch them to navigate. The initial page view needs to
fit on the landscape orientation of the iPad without any breaks, so that
the visitor gets a nice view of our content and navigation in one screen
without the need to scroll. All the graphics and page elements needed to
be scaled back to fit the iPad screen in both landscape AND portrait
orientation. Calls to action needed to be rewritten to encourage touch
navigation. Flash does not work on the iPad, but interaction and
animation is still critical to engage the initial visitor. So I had to
find a javascript solution that gives some feeling of animation and
interaction, but works well with touch...in other words, we had to
forget about mouse-over interactions as there is no way to mouse-over in
a touch interface. So, JQuery was chosen as the framework for a new set
of interactive gallery elements, and all javascript works in Safari and
current versions of Web Kit on the iPad.
What are your thoughts on HTML 5 and preparing video content for iPad
sites?
Our video was only in HD-WMV formats for members and Flash F4V for the
tour trailers. The iPad doesn't play either format. HTML 5 introduces
the new <video> tag which works a lot like the well-known <img> tag, but
it can only load video based on the browser. Firefox will only load Ogg
files with the <video> tag right now, and the iPad will only load H.264
video files. Interestingly enough, Flash's F4V (NOT flv) format is
actually an H.264 container, so Quicktime will play it as H.264. This
means that current F4V trailers could be embedded in HTML 5 using the
<video> tag on the iPad version of the site. But all of the member
videos must be republished as Apple iPad compatible H.264 video now,
which only supports a resolution up to 720p.
What sort of considerations do you make when designing navigational
graphics for an iPad site?
Apple states in their developer documentation that touch areas need to
be designed to be at least the size of the tip of the average male index
finger. Plus we no longer want to give the user a bunch of inline or
header text links, as these can be really hard to touch. Instead, we
made the "Join" link into a nice big button for the top of the page, and
produced a navigation bar that rests in the header with big graphical
text that is easy to read and touch. The join form options are on the
footer of every page and are touchable graphics. Every other
navigational item on the site is a 226px or greater photo or video
thumbnail that can be touched to load it's promotional page. The free
photos we offer for every gallery also needed to now have their own page
with an easy way to get back into the tour, as the iPad does NOT open
new windows in the browser (ie no target="_blank" option).