Turning your blog into an amazing iPad friendly app is is what a new WordPress plugin promises, and it only takes a few clicks.
Or rather, let me rephrase.
What the new Onswipe plug-in does, is turn you blog into an iPad app-like experience, complete with swipe gestures, Flipboard-like layouts, and your own springboard icon.
ITS VERY COOL TRY IT.
Theres nothing wrong with viewing a blog on the browser of an iPad today, the screen is big enough and most sites translate well; but with close to 20 million iPads already in circulation, a dedicated and adapted experience is a great plus to offer your readers!
HERES A FEW SCREEN-GRABS TO ILLUSTRATE WHAT IT ACTUALLY DOES.
Home page without the plug-in:
Home page with the plug-in:
Your own app icon on the iPad Springboard (#5 in the bottom bar):
What posts themselves look like:
THIS FIRST VERSION IS STILL A BIT ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES, BUT OFFERS A VERY COOL EXPERIENCE.
Comments and FB/Twitter/email sharing are integrated, and work great. You can easily customize your icon, fonts, color scheme. Id love to see more customization options, but thats a pretty good start, and gives me hope for more future apps and services to help individuals (or small businesses) publish touch-friendly content! I hear a built-in equivalent service is now available for wordpress.com hosted blogs but as I walked away from that a few months ago, I have not been able to check.
On the please improve in version 1.1, Id list a few bugs and issues.
No show-stopper there, but the experience will be better when the following is fixed or added:
embedded videos dont play,
the loading screen function does not seem to be working,
post titles are a bit too transparent, and hard to read against some busier images,
incompatibilities with a few java-heavy plug-in; it takes a little experimentation to activate (I had to de-activate a couple),
some key blog functions are missing, in particular the ability to subscribe by email or RSS, to browse by date or tags, to search etc
in standalone app-mode, the layout loses some space at the bottom of the screen (as the safari top bar disappears), and navigation switches back to Safari when you click on a link to another part of the site, which is a bit annoying,