I just wanted to share a little sneak peak of the second iPad site we’re working on. This one’s for photographers and it’s indeed shaping up very nicely. Minimal navigation, full screen images. You’ll be able to edit any portion of this with our cloud-based CMS via Finger Sites. Just a few more weeks till the private beta opens up and photographers everywhere will be effortlessly showing their clients their portfolio on their iPad. More importantly, the client won’t skip your site because it’s not optimized for touch! This little gem will work with any existing website, and your clients will be automatically redirected to your iPad site with one piece of copy-and-paste code that get’s placed on your existing main website.

With this customizable HTML5 iPad website, your client can add your site to their home screen of their iPad and show their friends your site and images, even if they don’t have Internet access. Pretty slick stuff. Full screen images, and built for touch. Head to http://fingersites.com and sign up to be notified of the private beta!

Your flash website can’t be viewed on the iPad. Your HTML website that requires a hover won’t work with a device that requires a touch.

Today marks a major milestone for not only Spilled Milk Designs, but for the entire web development community. OK so maybe we’re exaggerating just a bit, but truth be told we’ve done a heck of lot of research and have yet to find anything else like this on the planet. In fact we’re very comfortable in claiming this to be the first HTML5 touch website developed strictly for the iPad. But why build it? If you have a few minutes you can read our previous post which deals a lot with the “why.”

The most obvious is that flash isn’t available on the iPad. This isn’t a secret, and everybody is painfully aware of it. Naturally, when someone visits your flash website on their iPad, they leave because they can’t see your website. This is bad! Especially when you consider that tablets will account for 25% of the PC market by 2015. We won’t even go into the analysts predictions for iPad sales, as it has already “not acted like a natural consumer device.” We’ll just say 100 million people will be using the iPad to browse websites within the next 18 months. That’s a lot of stinking people hitting websites that aren’t designed to run on the iPad. How frustrating is it to visit a website that doesn’t serve a proper iPad version? How frustrating is to visit a website on an iPad that serves you the mobile version with BIG TEXT?

This got us thinking. If flash websites are for desktops, and mobile websites for for mobiles, obviously we need websites for the iPad and other tablets. Not just a “website that happens to work” with the iPad, or a “website that was modified to run” on an iPad,” we need a site “built FOR the iPad.” An alternative version with a proper interface built strictly for touch. More importantly it has to look and feel native to the iPad. Molding the site in this fashion leaves no question on how to navigate or utilize the features. So after a few long weeks months of research and development we’re finally ready to present the alpha version of our HTML5 iPad website.

When folks on an iPad hit our main flash website, they are automatically redirected to some alpha iPad flavored goodness. A 100% hand crafted HTML5 work of art. A finite amount of detail went into making the “web application” feel like a “native application” (an app that you get from iTunes is “native” while an app that runs on the web is a “web app”). When launched from the home screen you’re presented with a splash screen start up, and full screen goodness further solidifying the look and feel of a native app. All sections can be swiped, and recent blog posts can be viewed and shared (alpha) to Twitter or Facebook. A different layout is displayed depending on whether the iPad is turned vertically, or horizontally, while also boasting offline access that automatically updates the app when it senses an active Internet connection (alpha and still under development). Of course an HTML5 website for the iPad just wouldn’t be an HTML5 website for the iPad if it didn’t have HTML5 video, contact forms, swipe-able portfolio section, testimonials, and more.

Do you want one? We thought so, and of course we planned ahead and will soon be releasing an editable version. Not only that but we built others, and some really cool ones for photographers that we’ll be showing off later. Easily edit and publish your own iPad website, all before you finish your first cup of coffee. Easily implement into any website, you don’t have to know any coding, there’s nothing to install, and everything is already setup and waiting for you. Did we mention that you’d be able to edit and publish your iPad website from your iPhone, iPad, or Android device later this year? Excited? We are! Sign up to be notified when we release the biggest thing to hit the streets since sliced bread. Finger Sites, websites built for touch. http://fingersites.com

After a couple hundred hours of development, we’re finally wrapping up with the beta version our custom iPad web app. Built using pure HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript, it includes new technologies like SVG graphics, offline capabilities, splash screen start-up, and other HTML5 only goodies. We spent a lot of time crafting the web app to look as native to the iPad as possible, giving a familiar and friendly user interface from swiping to sharing. Well technically it was a team of code monkeys who did all the work. OK so not really monkeys, just one guy with mad skills, and myself who thinks big. So…why build it? A few reasons actually, and if you have a few minutes we’d like to enlighten you.

A tablet revolution is silently starting. 3 million iPads we’re sold in the first 90 days. 10 million will be sold by the end of this year. On Friday the iPad will be released in 9 more countries. In fact as of last month, more people are browsing the web on an iPad than on both Android-powered devices, and Blackberry devices combined. It took the iPad 2 weeks to pass Android in terms of web traffic. This doesn’t mean there are more iPads than Android-deices, it means that a greater percentage of iPad owners browse than web than Android  and Blackberry owners. These folks are surfing the Internet and running into websites that aren’t meant to run on an iPad. Visitors then leave frustrated.

This is a big problem, especially for photographers. Their website is their storefront, and these days we can’t afford to be skipped by the prospect who’s hitting our site from her iPad in Starbucks. This is only the beginning too, as analysts are predicting that tablets will account for 23% of the PC market by 2015. One out of four will be using tablets to shop. This isn’t about flash vs html, this is about giving your visitors the experience they deserve. Flash websites will always have a place on desktops, and will always be great for displaying feature rich websites. In fact SMD specializes in creating flash websites with Showit, and we don’t plan on stopping any time soon. It’s an amazing, versatile, feature rich design platform that after 7500 hours inside the cockpit, we still love it like the day we first started. Mobile websites will always have a place on mobile phones. Tablets deserve websites for tablets, and what we can do with the web and the iPad is amazing. Click is different than touch, and deserves a proper touch-to-toggle interface. Samsung, LG, HP, and Acer have all have publicly stated that they are working on getting tablets into the market, so it’s only a matter of time before your sites traffic explodes with tablet users hungry for tailored fit interfaces.

Is your website ready for visitors on tablets? If not, we can actually help, and it’ll only cost you $0.40 a day. We thought to ourselves, “hey why not make this thing editable for our clients to use?” So starting this fall you’ll be able to do just that. Create an account, log-in, choose a theme whether it be commercial or photography, customize, and publish your very own tablet web app. Just like that, and quicker than it will take you to finish your first cup of coffee. Your visitors hit your main flash website, and are redirected to your iPad web app. Visitors are encouraged to add your app to their home screen, and doing so they will be able to launch it full screen which starts with a custom splash start up image. With HTML5 comes neat things like local caching, so your visitors will be able to launch your web app even without Internet access. Easily swap out images, text, change colors, and turn that “visit” into an “experience.” It’s coming soon, and I hope you’ll join us. Ours isn’t quite ready to share just yet, but she will be soon…very soon.

We like to think big here at SMD. Well in order to think even bigger, we needed a bigger place to do so! Starting this weekend we’ll have 60 acres to look out across to inspire creativity. A space this large allow for a lot of thinking. All that’s being put to good use this fall.

SMD HQ is moving from one pasture to another, and to celebrate we’re having a sale! We don’t typically have sales very often so if you were on the fence about a custom website, now’s your chance to save!

From midnight tonight until next Tuesday at midnight (July 13th), custom sites will be discounted by 10%! Offer is valid for new inquiries over the next 7 days starting from midnight tonight (July 6th).

So I picked up the iPad a few days ago because we’re working on some updates that will convert our MilkPress Themes to an iPad friendly version, as well as convert the flash into all html. On top of that we’re going to build in some other cool features so we needed the iPad to make sure it worked. Love those “work purchases.”

In playing around I’ve noticed some things that I wanted to share. First, I definitely think you should create a +Site JUST for the iPad. The reason being is that the images should have different resolutions so they don’t look like crud on the iPad. The resolution of the iPad is 1024 x 768. So on your header for your html site, it needs to be 1024px wide (but on the stage in Showit at it’s current size). Second reason is that you want to make those buttons bigger for fingers, and maybe introduce another swipe gallery from HTML (notice the pt 1 of ?…). This is all so new so we’re learning as we go.

Another big reason that you should create a +Site JUST for the iPad will be video. For the time being, if you want a quick way to get video playing on your iPad site you can copy and paste the embed codes from youtube into your “page html”. The iPad will automatically recognize that it’s a YouTube video and show the HTML5 version of the player. The neat thing about this is that it’s integrated with the look and feel of the iPads OS down to the button glow. The downside of course is the branding issue; it’s a YouTube video. We do imagine putting in an open sourced video player, but the ones that I’ve seen so far are….ehh. The one we’re interested in hasn’t been released yet. This is just the beginning though. If there’s a world of iPad users surfing the net with no where to go, you might as well embrace them and build a site just for them. All with Showit…..all included. How sick is that?!

For Android users I recommend you start building a flash website right now and tailor it to them (ours is in the works). Since flash has already landed on the Nexus One and is currently Droid bound let’s serve them a mobile flash website. The difference here is the scale, or size of the site. You want GINORMOUS buttons and text so that it appears, correctly to scale, on a device thats 320×480 in resolution. The videos you currently have in your Showit website will work just fine (and is ultimately the reason I think they don’t work right now within Showit mobile) because they are already flash.

Anyhow there’s still a ton of work and research to be done but I wanted to post this up so you guys can know what we know. Have a super safe and fun Memorial Day weekend!