The Apple iPad is the single most exciting technology to come since the introduction of the IBM PC many years ago. ?I am old enough to see both come to market. ?The iPad is a platform for content consumption and we are seeing only the very beginning of how creators will visually delivery their content to us.

I have in recent months moved this blog to WordPress from another self-hosted platform and often wonder how I waited so long to make the transition when I see the great themes and plugins made available to us.

The recent release of WordPress 3.1 made me aware of one such plugin. ?Onswipe plugin allows any WordPress blog to have a unique view when viewing on the iPad. ?The implementation looks very much like my current favorite iPad app, Flipboard.

The publisher says:

Onswipe makes it insanely easy to publish on touch enabled devices. When your readers navigate from an iPad to your site they are given a beautiful app like experience.

This is a pretty bold claim but one I think the plugin lives up to quite handily.

I installed the plugin from the WordPress Dashboard and accepted the defaults. ?Above you can see what my blog looks like on the front page, taken from my iPad. ?If you are familiar with the Flipboard application, the user is presented with “swipe me”, a simple gesture brings the user to the first page of the site.

What interests me here is 5 posts shown per page and *if* I had an image associated a post, ?the image would be used. ?I think if there are multiple images in the post the first one appearing in the HTML will be used. ?The content is really nicely laid out and presented cleanly without any work on my end.

The page for a particular post has a very clean presentation. ?The font face and the color of the title are customizable from the WordPress Dashboard. ?Any comments for a post are visible from the View Comments button where users can also add new comments.

The little icon in the upper right corner of a post, like so many iPad apps, allows the reader to share the post to Twitter, Facebook or by email. ?This is nice little addition to the theme.

The menu button from the front page allows easy navigation to Pages, posts by a particular category or all the posts.

I have tested this blog from my iPad and it really is a thing of beauty. ?The HTML5 is well done and fast and truly transform my blog both in function and in presentation. ?Well-done Onswipe, who looks to have some other offerings on the horizon.

So, go grab your iPad and take a look at this site using it.