Apple has published a list of “iPad ready” sites. Apparently these sites “looks and functions beautifully on iPad”. But do they really? Is this all that is needed to make usable web sites for the iPad; use the <video> tag instead of flash and leave the rest of the site as it is for desktop browsers?

Well, I don’t think so. It is cool that video works on the iPad, and the new and fancy html5 and css3 stuff too, but the fundamental differences between a tablet with touch screen and a desktop/laptop device are ignored.

Any website must be created to accommodate the the device’s way to interact with the page (reading, performing actions, clicking etc.). Parameters are screen size (not necessarily number of pixels or physical screen measures) and interaction model (is it a mouse, joystick, touch screen etc).

For some reason, many of the brands Apple is listing are handling this difference well on their iPad apps, but not at all on their so called “iPad sites”. The over all usability of iPad apps are much better than the web sites. What’s the difference (in short)?

• Layout: Content is organized differently (different information architecture)
• Interaction: Bigger, more readable text. Easier to hit links/buttons on iPad apps, because you have to be able to hit them with your thumb (better affordance).

So why aren’t these principles used on tablet sites as well? This is obviously over-simplified, but these small things would have huge impact on the usability of the web sites on iPad and other tablets.

Even if it is easy and handy to pinch and zoom on the iPad, the user should not be forced to do that. He/she doesn’t have to do that in an app, why do that on a web site?

The other thing that is easy to forget is the difference in connection mode between a desktop device and a tablet. This is also an important parameter in the information architecture.

I hope (and believe) that things will start happening here. The recent facebook strategy will fuel this development. It’s really about common sense…

The mobile event of facebook may have been somewhat “foggy” for some, but I think more content owners should learn from Facebook. Especially the tablet strategy and the focus on web as the platform, not a pile of apps.

Erick Tseng said:

the rise of tablets isn’t going to be about the iPad alone — we’re going to soon see numerous additional devices running on Android and possibly other platforms. And given Facebook’s limited resources, it doesn’t really make sense to hone in on a single platform.

Via TechCrunch

Thank you Facebook!

I had to make a comment on an article in mobizmag.no. (The article is in Norwegian, so translated here)

My point here is that it is not fair to compare apps and web directly and then try to predict which one is going to die. Apps are nice for some things and web is good for other things. (…but the probability of death is way higher for apps than web in my mind…)

Further, the mobile web has the feature of being scalable. So much more scalable than appstores, that comparing numbers becomes irrelevant. Advising content owners to choose between apps and mobile web is soooo wrong.

The advice should be: “Make sure your web site is usable on mobile devices, and then see if some of your content or services make sense as an app (…and that you have the budget/business model for creating and maintaining the apps)”

As usual, much is happening in the mobile web space. Recent discussions of progressive enhancement, media queries, lazy desktop web developers, cool javascript frameworks etc. are all very good and bring the mobile web business to new levels.

In my humble opinion, the missing link in this discussion is connectivity. The new trends in mobile web development seem to assume that the end user is surfing on WiFi or a 3G/4G connection with a fixed price data plan. Even if mobile surfing over WiFi is increasing and fixed price data plans are quite popular, this is no reason for ignoring the connectivity dimension when talking about creating web sites for the mobile context.

• Most users are not on WiFi
• 3G coverage is generally poor
• Data is still expensive (most people have to pay their own phone bill…)
• You never know the real bandwidth.
• 2G/2,5G is still widely used.

So, my frustration is that even sites made for mobile, does not work very well when I am on the road or traveling. My phone bill is also complaining about this…

The reasons are of course that way to much data is sent over slow networks to the data hungry mobile web sites. Why?

• Connectivity and bandwidth is not an issue when creating desktop web sites => the developer assumes that bandwidth is not an issue.
• Developers develop for, and test on, their own WiFi connected iPhone.
• It is difficult to tell the actual bandwidth (especially on the client side using javascript)
• “Mobile web apps” tend to use more http connections (ajax, external resources etc)
• Huge amounts of overhead, unused css, JavaScript and markup.

Another issue that is worth mentioning is that mobile devices often loose connection. They switch between being online and offline (Not only when driving through a tunnel, but also when bandwidth is so low that the browser stops rendering a page). The good news is that this can (kind of) be handled on the client side by JavaScript and navigator.onLine, local storage, application cache and all the other new cool HTML5-ish stuff. What I miss with all the new and fancy mobile .js libraries popping up is the connection issue should be given just as much attention as enabling fancy transitions and animation! It doesn’t matter how fancy, smooth and responsive the animations and transitions are if the site it self is slow and suffering from too much data over a slow connection.

The problem is increasingly relevant as more tablet sized sites and web apps are launched. Bigger screens means more data over the air. But what if the iPad is a on 3G with poor signal quality? Even worse experience than on a mobile phone…

You might see where I am going here… I kind of agree with Daniel Hunt over at MobiForge. You can’t fix everything client side with .js and media queries. With media queries you serve lots of style irrelevant to the context, and potentially lots of markup and content with “display:none;” for mobile presentation. Server side magic is still needed to decide what the server should send to the client to ensure a good user experience.

So, dear desktop web developers longing for mobile web tooling and with youthful urge to create mobile web sites: Don’t rely only on media queries and a fancy .js framework. Mobile web is still slightly more complex than that… Not that I have the solution… wish I had… Do you?

A very cool way og reading statistics… Click the image to see a bigger presentation.

Created by Onlineeducation.net

if the voice commands works half as well as in this demo, I am still impressed! On the other hand I would not be surprised if Apple has done it again