I did it my way – the iPad – chapter 1

The iPad can be hard to please when designing websites

Responsive web design techniques are all the rage at the moment, and represent a fabulous way to create websites that look good and work well on handheld devices like mobiles and tablets. However, responsive design can come up short.

Responsive techniques work by checking the size, well width really, of the screen you are viewing the site on, and applying different design rules based on that.

Fantastic, and beats the previous options we had to live with, of either having a separate mobile site (how 2011) or even worse, having an app (how 2009)!!


image of iPad singing "I did it my way"

For any of you who have looked more closely at the iPad, you’ll notice that it doesn’t conform when it comes to responsive. No matter which way you hold it, the width stays at 768 pixels. Maybe those cool people at Apple really bought into the sentiment of Huey Lewis and the News’s track “Hip to Be Square”.

image of the ipad as a square device

This is a good example of why the team here at Big Media decided we needed more control over the way sites display, and invented Chameleon Software. By adding device recognition to websites, we’re able to provide different rules to devices and browsers that have an excessively independent way of looking at things. With tablets gaining in popularity for browsing the web, and the iPad in particular, having a bit more control over the way it displays your site just might make the difference in capturing your audiences attention.

In October we’re going to move to chapter 2 on the iPad, and explore a bit more into the idiosyncrasies of this iconic device.