I developed PadPressed without an iPad

Four months ago, entrepreneurs extraordinaire Andres Barreto and Jason L. Baptiste, contacted me about working on this new project: make a WordPress plugin that will make a site look and behave like a native iPad app. After talking him into use my own framework, of course I said yes.

Look, I haven’t even seen an iPad at this point. I knew that was a problem, but I was not going to let a rich hipster guy steal me this opportunity. So I had to make it work with what I had: Safari 5 (which has just been released with an iPad UA option) and the iPad simulator. Is funny, but the only chance I had to see my work running on an actual iPad was via a video that Jason sent me of him using his iPad every other morning.

Remote iPad Testing

So for the next month I worked very hard and came up with clever hacks to overcome this tiny limitation because we wanted to release before somebody else with the same idea and more resources. It was only after releasing the first version of the plugin that Andres and Jason graciously gave me a iPad, which was, btw, smaller and heavier than in my dreams.

Fast forward to yesterday, when we launched CoverPad, our second theme (which also got covered on TechCrunch) after three months of supporting and listening to our customers. So far, the reactions have been very positive (with one painful exception) and we are already looking into the future.

Our intention has been to stretch what CMS’s (WordPress in this case) and browsers are supposed to do, both on functionality and user experience. We are committed to keep doing it.

I’m very happy with what we’ve done, but please crash my ego and shatter my dreams with your criticism*.

* Not really. Please be nice