iPadThoughts

Even before getting my iPad, I’d been thinking about developing a better browser than Safari – and especially once I got my iPad, since switching from one “tab” page to another in Safari is much too inefficient. I was thinking that it would be great to be able to swipe left/right, maybe with two fingers, to move from one tabbed page to another … and look, tonight there’s Atomic Web Browser, fully implemented for iPad and doing exactly what I would want a browser to do …

The normal screen you see above includes address and search bars as well as the iPad time/status bar (however you can configure whether the time/status is shown); along the bottom are back/forward buttons to browse web pages, a button to switch to different “tab” screens, and buttons to add the current page (to bookmark, etc), and access the settings. There’s also (far right) a fullscreen button.
Pressing “+” on the bottom offers the normal “add as bookmark” as well as additional options including “post to Facebook” and “save webpage”:

“Save webpage” works exactly as you’d expect, with a list of saved pages available from the bookmarks (the yellow star top left of the normal screen).

Press the fullscreen button, and eliminate the address bar and time/status to get even more screen for the webpage – on this image, tabs are displayed for all open windows, but that too can be configured and toggled on/off:

Also on the above image, note the link options – if you tap a webpage link, it opens in the current page, but tap/hold and the option list appears, allowing a link to be opened in a new tab and happily offering the chance to “invisibly” load the new tab while you remain on the current page. Excellent!

Atomic Web Browser is full of settings to configure it precisely how you wish – right down to what the multi-touch actions do, what search engines to offer, and even a way to import bookmarks from your desktop machine):

The default for multi-touch control is two finger swipe left/right to move between tabs, two fingers up for home page (I changed that to call up the bookmarks), and two fingers down to close the current tab. Not configurable is the three finger touch, to exit fullscreen mode.

Even the search options are excellent in Atomic Web Browser – you can select from a number of different search engines (of course configurable, with even more possible to be added from the developer website; really nice is the inclusion of a “search current webpage” feature, which I use often on my desktop machine, and have missed on the iPad:

This is a fabulous browser, what the iPad should have come with, and totally worth the $0.99 cost! A HIT!

This entry was posted April 15th, 2010 at 9:51 pm under Best, Productivity, Utilities