OnSwipe Tablet-izes Marie Claire, Slate, Ziff Davis

This story appears in full at Folio: sister site minonline.

Have you seen your site on an iPad lately? More than a year into the tablet phenom, many publishers still struggle to make their standard Web sites work well across the desktop and touch screen interfaces. A hot start-up in New York OnSwipe is making a business of tablet-izing a site's content so that it feels and acts more like an app within the device's browser. The company has already launched tablet-compatible sites for MarieClaire.com, Slate.com, Ziff-Davis's Geek.com, ExtremeTech.com and Hollywood.com.

Content from the standard Web sites is turned into a series of larger tappable thumbnails with site index. At MarieClaire.com, for instance, eight categories occupy a top-line menu in landscape mode and a left-hand navigation column in portrait mode. Tapping on a category produces a pleasant effect in which the title of the category fades and zooms in before presenting the thumbnails for that area. Tapping into a story has it zoom in to fill the screen and allows for lateral scrolling across pages.

The look and feel is similar to the Flipboard iPad app and the way it integrates content from its featured magazine partners. A small tab on the upper left of the page gives the user direct return to the cover page and index. Tablet users who navigate to the standard URL with their browser are prompted to turn the bookmark into an app-like icon for their Home page to use as a shortcut.

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