So we've recently got our hands on our very own iPad, adding to the ridiculous pile of Apple hardware in our home/business (two MacBooks, two iPods, an iPhone (two if you include the one lost in a field somewhere) a Mac Mini, an ancient eMac and a filing cabinet full of peripherals).

It's a gorgeous bit of kit - as Mr Jobs says, it's totally lovely to browse the web on, and Google Earth is just a joy to play with - and throws up a few interesting design and code issues too:

Another new resolution to design for. In fact, there's two, thanks to the iPad's magical rotating feature. Screen resolutions have been gaining width steadily for a while, and the prevailing habit has been to think of the 'fold' as a point at which to bury less important content; in Portrait mode, this is no more.

No more Flash navigation. Whatever your thoughts on the iOS Flash debate, it's good to see something finally kicking this horrid habit out. If it isn't coded, it isn't there. No support for Flash video, either, of course: I'll be following the lead of YouTube and using .h264 from here on.

Some interesting CSS issues. For instance, Mobile Safari doesn't do fixed positioning: it shows you the proportion of the website which fits on screen and treats what you can see as a 'viewpoint'. So if you've got something strapped to the bottom of your web page, it's going to stay at the bottom of the page. When you scroll, you ain't going to see it no more.

It's pleasing to see, though, that every site I've worked on over the past few years works OK on iPad. That's what standards-compliance is for...

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Solway Insulation is a new launch this month - a fairly simple but attractive site for a company which is fast-expanding in the region. The man in charge of this particular company was one of my first clients, from way back in 2002: doesn't time fly.

This is a first outing for Unify, which is a fairly nifty bit of database-free content editing software which lets the client edit the site in a wysiwyg format, without altering the overall structure of the site. We're still working out how to make this run with include files and friendly URL strucures, but it looks like a potentially useful bit of software for the future.

Technologies: CSS, xHTML, PHP, Unify.

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I managed to finish my first two terms as a lecturer without losing any more of my hair - although switching to lecturing one day a week probably helped.

At the end of last term the Creative Industries department hosted an exhibition to showcase students work: our web development work was a part of this. We built a showcase website to host student sites on which was displayed in one of our development labs: the site is now viewable online too.

I hope my students learned something over the last few months; I certainly learned a lot...

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I've been working with JBA Seed Potatoes a lot this month, building new systems and functionality into their front-end website and stock control systems. This is one of the sites we've recently launched: Seed Potato Merchants, a new channel to market for the company.

We had to do some tricky Javascript and jQuery work to make the user interface a bit more friendly - there's a lot of data being pushed at the user here - and quite a lot of preparation to make the existing (ASP) back end systems work with the new (PHP) front end.

We're now going to work on taking all the new features we've built - including customer accounts and order tracking - and work this back into some more projects for the company, which should continue to keep us busy...

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