Wednesday, November 3, 2010

iPad – Apps vs Bookmarks

I love my iPad, my kids love my iPad. Its pretty darn nifty-keen. But, it is a device for consumption of content, not producing content. I am still fastest at sharing or producing at a desktop or laptop.

When I first bought it all my iPhone apps synced up to it. I tried to use them but they were all sized for the smaller iPhone screen. So I looked for a better way.

Since the apps were created to connect me to web content, I saved all the web addresses as bookmarks on the iPad screen. I figured I could access them via Safari on the web.

I hit the snag that the iPad is seen as a mobile device by most browsers and will therefore show you the mobile version of websites and not the laptop/desktop version. For me this is a snag because functionality and the richness of the website or service is lost in the translation to the mobile layout. The safari mobile browser will display the desktop layout of a website, but stutters and cannot handle the embedded frames or “widgetized” sections of modern websites. For example, you can see Google Reader in the desktop version with the expanded display, but if a post is longer than the current screen, you cannot scroll down to see the bottom of the post with the space bar. Your only option is “next post” or clicking the post title to open in a new window. I had similar issues with Hootsuite on the web. I tried a new browser Atomic Web, which added tabbed display as an enhancement over safari, but pages are still rendered for the mobile device.

The lesson is that when possible, download and use the app for the service to get the maximum functionality (Hootsuite, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pandora, etc). For Google services, (reader, mail, calendar, youtube) they continue to enhance their mobile versions so I recommend sticking with the bookmarks to their mobile versions. Or the google app that directs you to their optimized mobile versions.

Let me know if you discovered a better way.

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