{"id":327,"date":"2015-09-30T12:56:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T11:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathonmills.com\/?p=327"},"modified":"2015-09-30T13:39:47","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T12:39:47","slug":"ipad-pro-will-affect-web-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathonmills.com\/ipad-pro-will-affect-web-development\/","title":{"rendered":"The iPad pro; how will it affect web development?"},"content":{"rendered":"
At the beginning of September, Apple announced the iPad Pro, it’s latest iteration of the massively successful line of tablets. The iPad pro shares a lot of similar features to it’s predecessors, offer a powerful, yet portable touch device. However, where it differs from the iPad Air is it’s whopping 12.9″ retina display. This is just 0.4″ short of the 13″ retina Macbook Pro display size (which is 13.3″ diagonally across the screen), so we’re essentially dealing with something in size that has previously been reserved for laptops and notebooks.<\/p>\n
In order to explain how this is a game-changer, I first need to explain (roughly) how responsive development is currently carried out. Before the advent of smart phones and tablets, a site was designed and built for a fix width, somewhere in the region of 800 to 940 pixels in width, give or take. This would fit into most users viewports on their desktop web browser and you didn’t have to do much in the way of how the user interacted with your site; a mouse click was sufficient to get around, and this functionality is obviously already built into an operating system and any browsers it makes use of. As a developer you were really placing objects around a screen, in a particular flow, whilst possibly adding some fancy effects or animations.<\/p>\n
However, this all really changed with the introduction of smart phones and tablets. There were two issues, the first being the screen size was now considerably smaller and the second being the mouse had been replaced with the finger, which could be considered a lot less accurate than the deliberate movement and click of a mouse cursor. When Apple first introduced the iPhone, their solution was to display a scaled version of the site, with a zoom capability that allowed you to make areas of the site bigger\/smaller and then tap on those zoomed items to interact with them. It worked, it was relatively intuitive, but it still didn’t feel like a complete solution.<\/p>\n
Prior to the iPhone, in 2004\u00a0Cameron Adams first demonstrated the idea<\/a> of an adaptive\/fluid layout that changed depending on device width, but it wasn’t until 2009 that the technology required to make it standard (CSS3 media queries<\/a>) was made available for developer consumption. It’s unclear who is really responsible for responsive design taking off\u00a0(you could say it was really the development communities passion for it), but in terms of it becoming a necessity, none other than Google can take the crown for moving it from a recommendation to a necessity (Google now include having a mobile site as a parameter for ranking your website).<\/p>\n