Simon Willison’s Weblog

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13 items tagged “ipad”

2013

What design techniques does Apple use in the introduction page of iPad Air?

Apple used the same technique on their Apple—Mac Pro page. I first saw this trick used on the BeerCamp at SXSW 2011 page.

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Why didn’t Apple release a gold (champagne) iPad?

According to John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2013/1...

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Does the Quora iOS app allow one to give “Thanks?”

I’d really like to be able to do this—could there be room for it in the little cog menu, next to “promote”?

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2010

Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5? A scathing critique of the new Wired iPad app, which weighs in at 500MB per issue due to storing every single page as two static PNG images—one for landscape and one for portrait mode. “The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism: you download it via the App Store versus buying a CD-ROM”. # 28th May 2010, 12:13 pm

ZOMBO.com in HTML5. Uses SVG (scripted by JavaScript) and the audio element. Finally, Zombo.com comes to the iPad. # 20th May 2010, 3:26 pm

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.

Rafe Colburn # 5th May 2010, 12:10 pm

Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. [...] Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working.

Louis Gerbarg # 12th April 2010, 5:24 pm

Popular Science+. Matt Webb’s write-up of the Mag+ project, the platform behind the highly praised Popular Science+ iPad application. # 12th April 2010, 1:06 pm

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas. This looks pretty awesome—Illustrator CS5 and Flash CS5 can export to a new “FXG” format, and Adobe are providing a JavaScript library to load that format via Ajax and render the contents (including Flash animations) in a canvas element. Could be great for displaying newspaper infographics on the iPad. # 11th April 2010, 6:33 pm

I’m not worried about guys like us. There will always be machines for us (powerful, complex, etc.). Why? Because if for some magical reason there wasn’t all of a sudden, we’re the type that would just make one.

Jason L. Baptiste # 2nd March 2010, 9:36 am

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.” # 31st January 2010, 12:05 pm

Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion. Chris Thorpe: “It may not be a Jesus phone, a Moses tablet or something that lives up to hype and hyperbole, but if it does something for the digital inclusion agenda it might live up to Steve Jobs saying it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.” # 28th January 2010, 9:03 pm

If Apple is really successful, it’s likely that other companies will be more emboldened to forsake openness as well. The catch is that customers won’t accept the sudden closing of a previously open platform, that’s one of the reasons Palladium failed. But Apple has shown that users will accept most anything in an entirely new platform as long as it offers users the experience they want.

Rafe Colburn # 28th January 2010, 9:54 am