Spoofing my TabletPC as an iPad

Hot on the heels of the release of the iPad, I decided to repave my TabletPC (an HP TX2520ea) with a fresh install of Windows 7. I haven’t been making real use of the tablet for about a year now as I have been highly development focussed and less managerial but it was time to upgrade from Vista.

I did have a quick look at some iPad-ready websites using Safari and spoofing the browser User Agent as an iPad but the configuration steps are clunky and need to be carried out each time you create a new Safari instance.

Then yesterday I read “Use Gmail for iPad in Google Chrome” which shows how to easily open Chrome with spoofing enabled and a brainwave came to me. I use RocketDock (an excellent application launcher for Windows which emulates the Apple Dock) and I realised that it would be easy to configure docked shortcuts for spoofing.

You simply create a new docked shortcut to chrome.exe and configure the arguments, setting the desired app URI:

--app="http://www.example.com" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10"

So far there aren’t a large number of sites which are iPad-ready but there are enough to make a difference to my TabletPC experience, especially as I am a heavy Google Apps user and significant work has been done by Goole on their properties to better support the iPad (it would have been nicer if they had already done this work for Windows 7 Touch devices, but there we are). Here is a selection of screenshots of Google Apps spoofed as an iPad:

Mail

 

Docs

Calendar

Tasks

Here are some other Google sites:

Mobile

Search

Reader

News

Buzz

Talk

Maps

YouTube

Finally, here are some other iPad-Ready sites:

Twitter

Facebook

Delicious

BBC iPlayer

Of course, you can’t run iPad Apps on Windows 7 but the rush to roll-out tablet-style websites that look good on the iPad will coincidentally benefit TabletPC owners like me and that makes me happy.