Here are some tips for modifying your existing website so that the user gets a different experience when browsing on the iPad.
- Test your website in Safari on iPad using the iPhone Simulator (Hardware -> Device -> iPad). iPad is available in the iPhone Simulator in iPhone OS 3.2 SDK.
- Test your website on iPad, and update user agent detection code if necessary. iPad user agent string is:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10
- Simulating Safari on iPad HTTP requests in Safari on the desktop. First, enable the checkbox next to “Show Develop menu in menu bar” in Safari’s Advanced Preference pane. Next, select Develop -> User Agent -> Other from the Safari menu. You will be prompted to enter a user agent string. Copy the Safari on iPad user agent string above, then paste in it into the dialog box that appears. Note: You can try this trick with websites like Gmail and YouTube to view how they display a different version of their website for iPad Safari.
- Using a constant for viewport width.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
- Prepare for a touch interface. Don’t use a:hover pseudo class or mouseover events.
- Orientation media queries to automatically select the proper stylesheet based on whether the user is in landscape or portrait.
<link rel=”stylesheet” media=”all and (orientation:portrait)” href=”portrait.css”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” media=”all and (orientation:landscape)” href=”landscape.css”>