Sunday, May 16, 2010

Updating Jake's Rolex World for iPad Viewing


Updating Jake's Rolex World
for iPad & iPhone Viewing

Hi Everybody,

As many of you know, I was extremely excited for the iPad to come out since I knew it would completely revolutionize the viewing experience and quality of Jake's Rolex World and actually make it into a world-class digital magazine that was also very good for the environment.

When the iPad first came out, the first thing I did was check out Jake's Rolex World and it was one of the biggest disappointments of my life!!! The iPad was amazing, but Jake's Rolex World looked terrible and kept crashing the iPad!!!

The challenge was that in trying to make Jake's Rolex World future-proof, I over-shot the mark quite a bit!!!

Unfortunately, I have had to completely redesign the html infrastructure and UI which is terribly time consuming and challenging and required a lot of math skills I typically don't use.

The great news is that doing so was a blessing in disguise and now Jake's Rolex World is looking better and loading faster than ever on the desktop, on laptops, as well as on the iPad and iPhone!!!

There are four phases to optimizing Jake's Rolex World and as I complete each phase, I will update it here:

  • Phase 1: Figure out what was wrong and how to fix it!!! This was not easy and my brain is still hurting from all the math and experimenting with the User Interface. The challenge is that I did not want the new user interface to simply work on the iPad and iPhone, I wanted it to look and work perfectly. I also did not want to waste a single pixel. The biggest challenge was making certain it looked great on the desktop and on laptops as well as on the iPad and iPhone. (Status: Complete)
  • Phase 2: Redesign and resize all page and UI elements to optimally fit on the iPad and iPhone screen. (Status: Complete) Having completed this means Jake's Rolex World is not viewable on an iPad and iPhone with the following exceptions:
  • Phase 3: Redesign all story view shortcuts that appear on all pages on the sidebar (Status: Complete)
  • Phase 4: Take all large stories and break them into multiple segments so the iPad and iPhone won't crash on them. (Status: In Progress)
I am completely committed to providing you (my readers) with the absolute best viewing and reading experience possible and now Jake's Rolex World looks amazing on the iPad and iPhone!!!

Warmest regards,

Jake