APEXBlogs v2 - iPad compatible, even charts!

It's very exciting to announce the new APEXBlogs site is now iPad compatible!

I find it so cool! Now you can look at the latest news on APEX everywhere.

Following enhancements where made to make the site iPad compatible:

• If you navigate to apexblogs.info and you tab the + to add it to your Home Screen on the iPad, it gets a proper icon.
• APEXBlogs is optimised to run in Landscape mode (iPad rotated left or right), if it's not then a popup message will appear to tell you, it looks even better if you turn the screen.
  
• The other exciting enhancement is that you will see also charts now! As the iPad doesn't support to run Flash, we included NFCharts, the Non-Flash Charts APEX Plugin created by APEX Evangelists. If you are on your PC you still see the Flash Charts as there is only a redirect when there is an iPad/iPhone/iPod found. If you want to see the non-Flash charts also on your pc, go here. Look pretty similar no? I love our plugin and it will become available for sale very soon. Keep an eye on John Scott's blog as well as he will do more posts about NFCharts in the coming days too.

To get the site working nicely with the iPad, this website gave me good tips.

Hopefully some people can give it a try on their iPad. I know quiet a lot of people in the APEX community have one, so look forward what you think of it.

Make your APEX app iPad compatible

I really like surfing on my iPad whenever I'm not behind my laptop.

As the iPad doesn't have a big resolution, Apple made it so that it scales websites to fit on the device. Most of the time it's doing a really good job, but a lot depend on how the developer created the site.

If you look at APEX applications, if you are using a standard theme, you have a big chance it renders well and you don't have to do that much.

However if you find that something doesn't look good, the way I make my application 'iPad compatible' is by using a different css depending the browser and device that hits the app.

Below you see a screenshot of the Header in the Template of the new APEXBlogs site.

My starting theme for APEXBlogs v2 was theme 22, but I customised it heavily as you'll see in a couple of days. I'm doing that by overwriting the standard css by defining my own in the apexblogs.css file (so make sure your own css is defined after the standard APEX ones). If the max width of the device is 1024px (like the iPad) I overwrite my own css with specific settings for these devices. So in your link you define for the media "only screen and (max-device-width: 1024px)".

As you can see theme 22 of APEX 4 itself actually renders different css's based on the browser (see if IE in screenshot). I chose to not worry about IE6 compatibility, that is why that div "outdated-browser" is in.