Wow Your iPad Readers
With the launch of Apple’s iPad we have seen the future of computing and it is touch. Nothing matches the visceral feel of navigating your digital world with your hands. The past four months we’ve been working closely with Onswipe to bring your iPad visitors our vision of what a blog can look like re-imagined for a touch experience.
Our iPad-optimized view is app-like in its functionality, but pure HTML5 goodness on the backend: it supports touch interactions, swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad. Like when we launched our smartphone-optimized WP-Touch integration in 2009 (now responsible for over 150 million page views a month) this is immediately available and active on the over 18 million blogs on WordPress.com.
There are some fun options to play with too. If you browse to Appearance -> iPad in your Dashboard you can:
- Have the theme use an image from your recent posts as a cover.
- Upload a logo to showcase your brand or personality on the cover.
- Upload an image to be used as a loading graphic when visitors add your site to their home screen.
- Switch fonts.
- Choose from 9 different skin colors, to best match the feel of your site.
- Enable or disable the whole thing.
When you tap to view a post, you get to see the full content with a slick commenting interface and social sharing tools for Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com literally at your finger tips. It’s a lot of fun browsing sites with Onswipe.
Check out the Onswipe support document to learn more.
Onswipe has also made the plugin available for self-hosted WordPress.org sites.
On WordPress.com we’re seeing about 750,000 page views a day from iPad visitors and it continues to rise. New tablet devices seem to be coming out every time you turn around. In the coming months we’ll be expanding to work with other popular tablet devices, but we chose to focus on the iPad first because… well it’s cool.
WordPress.com News 
Sounds cool! Oh, I’m the first to comment! Yay, WordPress! Yay, iPad! How can it get better? 😀
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That’s cool. Unfortunately, I don’t have an iPad and I’m not even gonna plan to buy one. I’d rather go with an Android-powered tablet.
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@Sajib iPad’s are too expensive. Android is….. Google, and I’m a Bing person. I wouldn’t go for either of the two – I’d just go for a MacBook. 🙂
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@doctorwhofan98, Ah MacBook. I’m still dreaming of a MacBook Pro. Someday I’ll go get a MB Pro for sure.
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@Sabjob I’m sure you will. 🙂
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I don’t like the new look. How can I go back?
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You can disable Onswipe by going to Appearance->iPad in your Dashboard.
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I really think that Apple’s iPad is so cool, the only thing is that it’s so expensive, but that’s just me…
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Sounds wonderful!
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@shoesaddiction It is expensive. Very. But sometimes it’s worth it…. Others it’s not. I mean, you drop it and all your money… useless.
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This looks so cool! I wonder if any of my blog readers are using an IPad.
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Great plugin. Cool use of the post image for the post, but its all pixelated because it’s stretched, of course
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How is the menu for the iPad view selected/created? The menu that appears for one of my blogs doesn’t match the menu on the non-iPad site. It looks (possibly) like an older version of the menu.
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The menu is created by default from your pages and categories. It does not use anything from Appearance->Menus.
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@doctorwhofan98 I know, it’s expensive and it’s worth it, but I have to sell a lot of my shoes, oh boy! Again, that’s just me 🙂
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Well, I don’t have an iPad, but it sounds good, and if I would buy one, it’ll work and that’s good 😉
But I also use my lovely MacBook! 😛
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As an iPad user and blog reader, I must say I’m neither “wowed” nor very amused by this. I much prefer the old type skins – this new one seems both less clear and less convenient to use. Is there any way to turn this off as a reader, or is it only the authors for each blog that can do that?
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We are working on a way for readers to be able to switch to the standard view.
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Can we see in stats what part of our visitors come via iPads?
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Sorry, we don’t have that level of detail available on a site by site basis.
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now you just have to make WordPress Dashboard work on iPad so that we can use the iPad also for blogging, not only for reading blogs – whenever I try to edit one of my posts on the iPad it simply gives me an empty box (might be white text on white background as well) 😦
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Have you tried using the WordPress for iOS app? We recommend using that over the Dashboard.
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Yay!! This IS cool! I use my iPad a great deal, and I know plenty of people who put in most of their internet time on their iPads. Yay!
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No, wordpress, why? I spent so long customising my theme, now you’ve onswiped it! Don’t get me wrong, i love you guys – but what i really need is a better app for iPad. WP for iOS doesn’t make it easy to use creative commons images, or to insert links. An improvement to that would be really great.
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2011 will be a great year for WordPress for iOS, expect many improvements soon.
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Absolutely terrible if you use the iPad browser to access some of the features that the WordPress app doesn’t allow you to do. Disabling now.
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Which features are you referring to?
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Playing with it now. I like it that you can change the font and color. Will there be different themes in the future? Also, what is the “screen image”? I uploaded an image for both the cover logo and the screen image, but only the cover logo appeared (and too small at that). What am I missing?
WordPress thinks of everything! First class platform all the way.
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The Launch Screen Image will be used if you Save the site to your Home Screen. While loading that image would be displayed.
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See your wordpress blog’s iPad version on Mac. Enable Develop menu on Safari, choose iPad as user agent.
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Nice tip!
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Good news again here ! I’ve just forward the info to all my contacts who are “ipaded” Thank you Nick 🙂
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Wow! Just logged in via my iPad and didn’t even recognize my blog. It lost about 75 percent of it’s originality in the transformation. Yikes!
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I do not own an IPad, I do not intend to buy one, and none of my friends has one. However, I am keen to use all the settings of this new feature, add a cover logo, launch screen image etc, to improve the experience of my readers who might own one, especially as I suspect many of them do for some reason. So my question is: how do I visualise the changes made? I can see there is a tip given by someone earlier for Mac users, but I own a PC, so how do I do that? At the moment I have left it “onswiped”, but I have no idea how the website looks. If I am unable to view the changes then I will reluctantly untick the box as Id better be safe than sorry….
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There are some great suggests in the comments on how you can see how it would look by using your browser. Try them out.
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Looks cool, a lot like flipboard for iPad. Only thing is you can’t see YouTube video’s that I posted on my blog.
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The current Youtube shortcode embeds a Flash version of their player and Flash is not supported on iOS devices. We’re working on some solutions for this.
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ABSOLUTELY love my site on the iPad!! The only downside is that I don’t like how my blog looks on my laptop anymore, haha!
Thanks, WordPress!
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This is exciting news. There are going to be so many nG and embedded devices that pretty soon you will be able to tweet from the Coke machine!
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Nice work Guys
I think it will be great if wp create this stuff for Non Ipad such as android based tablet
what do you think?
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Sounds like a great idea but it really needs a preview feature – I don’t have an iPad and have never used one so I don’t understand how the different options will affect the appearance of my site on the device.
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Looks good! But it doesn’t pick up images linked from Flickr, just the ones I’ve uploaded to WordPress. Also, doesn’t display an embedded Youtube video.
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We’re working on both of these issues.
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My dad saw the changes before me and loved the new layout. Thanks WordPress, it’s beautiful!
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Wouldn’t touch it with a 10-ft pole. I access [and update] my site with an iPad easily 30% of the time. It works fine without what I would consider the distorted view of Onswipe.
Nice try – but FAIL.
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Love your work!
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A ‘beautiful app-like experience’? I don’t think so! Sorry guys I really do love 99.99% of what you give us but this is awful! And I have really been looking forward to something which will help to translate the hard work I put into my blog’s appearance to the i-pad [mainly Apple’s fault I know] but this is not it. It mangles my blog horribly, and a friend’s is even worse. 1/10. 😦
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@Thor and @Nick – I’d like to use the dashboard for writing and editing posts on my ipad but can’t. The WP for IoS App only has an HTML view which is not what I want.
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I admit I freaked out at first as I wasn’t expecting it. However, after spending a little time with it and seeing how easy it was to navigate, I’m in!! Cool beans!
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Oh, I should have mentioned I have an iPad so I got to see it up close and personal. LOL!
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THANK YOU!!
Do you guys ever sleep over there?
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Absolutely wonderful. I look forward to playing around with it. Thanks!!
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Cool! Something else to learn and play with. And thanks for the tip about the Develop menu, didn’t know that was there. I’ve only been using a Mac since last October for NaNoWriMo. WordPress keeps getting better and better! 🙂
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Eep! I don’t keep up with the WordPress blog, so was really shocked to view my blog on an iPad tonight. An opt-in set-up might have been better, especially for other folks who might not see their sites on a device like this and are unaware of the default need to disable. Also, comments are not visible, and readers can’t comment.
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Okay, I have to correct my earlier comment here – comments *are* visible and postable with swipe me, it just requires the extra step of seeing the word balloon (which I obviously didn’t) and tapping it.
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How do people leave comments on sites that have this feature enabled? I couldn’t figure out how to leave a comment – so it appears that this feature is about form versus function. I like comments, and want to make commenting as easy as possible for my readers – so I’m disabling this for my blog sites.
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There is a comments bubble in the upper right area of a post.
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Wow!! Thanks WP!
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It is a good news to iPad users.
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I just noticed that for some reason the onswipe theme removes YouTube videos from the posts… what’s up with that?
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iOS devices do not support Flash. We’re working on some updates to our Youtube embeds to make them work.
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Well, spending just 15 minutes perusing my favorite blogs from my iPad, I have to say that I think it’s a change for the worse. It’s just wrong on so many levels. I only wish my fellow bloggers would wake up and disable this feature so that they could return to normal.
For one thing, there’s a glitch in the comment box, which didn’t allow me to move my cursor around – I finally gave up trying and cancelled. Also, one of the neatest features about iPad is being able to enlarge the former comment boxes…not so in this format, and it’s much smaller than before.
Guess I’ll be visiting my “Blogger” buddies when on this gadget.
Sorry, WP. 😦
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It is fabulous! Stunning! I am absolutely delighted and have posted a special thank you to WordPress on my blog.
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Since iPad does not support flash,i am going to gold out for the BlackBerry playbook. Got to ‘play’ with this week at long last, and i have to say it gives the iPad a heavy run for it’s money, and my money is on the playbook.
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Sounds very cool! Thanks WordPress!
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This is a great feature but I think the choice to use it should be offered to the blog reader rather than the blog owner. I found it a bit off-putting to see it was set as a default.
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We’re working on a way for readers to be able to see the standard site, just like the option on our mobile themes.
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Don’t like this at all. I spent forever finding the best template for what I needed. This has just blown it out of the water. I can’t understand why it has been set up as default. I follow another blog and I don’t like how it shows it either. This should definitely be an ‘opt in’. What is the point of setting up a template if a lot of your readers will automatically see it differently? As an option, it’s great but not as the default.
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It is only on by default if the site is using mobile themes. If the owner of the site is not using mobile themes, Onswipe defaults to off. You can always disable it in the settings as well.
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As a writer and educator for those with disabilities, in particular Visually impaired/ Low vision students, I’ve seen huge interest in this community. I’m looking for more information about WordPress related elements that would support the I-pad’s capabilities, such as viewing articles as turnable pages, interactive pathways, and integration with images and other media.
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On an unrelated note: I sort of like the iPad theme, but I am in two minds about it – and so would be my readers I suppose. Couldn’t you have a link on the iPad theme (and the iPhone theme for that matter) that allows the reader (!) of the blog to choose the full desktop version instead? Thats the way Google Reader does it, and especially on the iPad i am sometimes using one mode, sometimes the other, depending what i want to do Sometimes surfing on a mobile device involves a compromise, and who am I to impose this choice on my readers?
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Yep, we’re working on it.
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iPad so steady and smart. Good luck! There is no other word but thanks for giving comfort to us all.
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Nice feature, but not sure if you’re aware of issues with viewing on iPad’s Twitter app. The WordPress site is not fully visible, and you can’t scroll horizontally. A little frustrating.
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Can you try using the Safari browser instead? Generally the in-app browsers are not very good.
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This is so insanely cool. I just tried it out on my own blog yesterday, and while it feels a bit laggy at times when images and scripts are loading, it really gives your site that unexpected wow-factor when you browse it from an iPad. May i ask why you to chose this system rather than some of the other ones out there?
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I think it should have a preview of the theme, because not everyone on wordpress own an ipad to see it but still wanting Ipad users to have a cool experience…
Another thing, this won’t work on another tablets right?
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Not yet. Only iPad for now as mentioned in the post.
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That’s awesome. Pls could you send me an ipad to test it? 🙂
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Terrific idea! 🙂
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Another thing.. I’ve noticed my YouTube and Vimeo videos don’t show in the iPad version. Am i the only one with this bug?
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Nope, we need to make some changes to the shortcodes to support devices without Flash.
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@ProjectJeremy: I agree – would prefer to see this (and other future functions) offered as opt-in versus opt-out. I don’t want to see this space turn into what Facebook is doing (i.e., updating features every two days, and making people turn them off instead of allowing people to turn them on).
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Thanks for this! I tried it out and what I can see on my iPad is great. The theme inspires me to put a picture in every blog article so that it will look nicer for iPad users (and PC users as well) when visiting my blog.
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One more: the menu-thing is a deal breaker for me. For reasons that I do not want to get into my top-menu does not reflect my pages hierarchy, and any theme that does not respect this does not work for me….
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I found it easy to navigate. Also thanks for the reference about the app alternative to dashboard. My biggest complaint was not being able to write posts on dashboard on my iPad. I’m downloading the iOS app now. Oh, and my iPad was a gift. They gave it to me for Mother’s Day, I think so that I wouldn’t leave.
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I was able to get the iPad version of the site to show up with Safari for Windows by enabling the Developer menu, then using this custom User Agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10
The “iPad” agent in Safari on Windows didn’t work, but the above custom string did.
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Sweeeeeet! Can’t wait to try it out on my new iPad (which is currently somewhere over the midwest right about now).
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I experienced the same problem as Pearl with the comment box – I could not move around in it very easily at all. I also like the idea of giving readers the option to switch between the two.
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Is there a way to test it when we don’t have either an Ipad or a Mac? I would like to test it before launching it, so that I’m sure my template is not blown off.
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Yep, several comments here give instructions on how you can test it.
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Yep, check some of the other comments for some things you can do.
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Is anyone else finding that embedded videos don’t show up at all?
Though it does look great and is very impressive (and an improvement on my current appearance), I would prefer that it be an opt-in feature. Because now I need to either disable it or figure out this glitch with the videos.
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I’m sure others are asking.. How can I check out my WordPress.com or .org blog on iPad – when I don’t own one? I’ve already researched this, and there is a very simple solution, using Apple Safari browser. The iPadification of WordPress.com (http://teabrooke.com/2011/03/24/the-ipadification-of-wordpress-com/)
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LOVE IT!! GREAT JOB!! And easy enough to disable if you don’t like it. No, it doesn’t look like my regular blog theme, but I love it, something different! Yes, keep the upgrades coming for WordPress for iPad… I.e. Ability to add a caption to a photo, etc…
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Amazing!!! Technology just keeps getting better and better.
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A little tip – If you want to test the ipad theme, but you don’t have an iPad, most browsers allows you to change the user agent. Switching it to Safari Mobile > iPad will render the iPad version in your desktop browser 🙂
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I see that you are working on switching this from opt-out to opt-in. Thank you. I find it kind of annoying on some WP blogs that I frequent, since I have no way to access any of their widgets or links. It would be really helpful if the reader could switch back to the normal site. I use my ipad almost exclusively, so I’ll be looking forward to reading blogs normally again.
I like the concept a lot, it’s just that it doesn’t make an easy transfer to the majority of blogs. Plus, as other have said, it destroys the originality of each person’s blog. I would love to see this as simply a theme, like the others.
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Just so there is no confusion, we’re adding a way for readers to switch between the standard site or the Onswipe view. It will still be up to the owner of the site if they want to have it enabled.
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One more thing, I use tags, not categories, and on swipe doesn’t show tags at all.
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Sorry, current version does not display tags. Thinking about showing them with a way to browse though.
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It’s cool, of course, but I cannot see videos in iPad version ( in iPhone yes, but not in iPad ). And we lost lots of things of our blog, for example integrated Flickr and Twitter, and widget contents.
But surely, it’s really no good when we cannot see videos. 😦
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Cool. Set my font to Zapfdinbats….For the iPad users.
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WOW!! Very Kool
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WordPress.com dashboard -> Appearance -> iPad: Launch Screen Image, Use an image exactly 768×1004px <– Is that correct? Or should it be 768×1024px (the actual screen resolution of the iPad)?
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Nice catch! Fixed it to 1024.
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Awesome! I wish I had an iPad! Or have. Sounds wickedly fun!
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Just Noticed this last night & it looks awesome!
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Absolutely ingenious–thank you, wordpress!
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Dear Santa
I know it’s not Christmas for a long time, but if you did want to give me a present in the middle of the year, twisting arms at WordPress to have this feature added to the wordpress.org Jetpack plug-in would be very nice.
Thank you
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