We're pleased to announce the official availability of the Ars Technica Reader for iPad, made possible in partnership with IBM. We thank IBM for supporting the Reader for iPad, and we hope you will enjoy version 1.0. In the rest of this column, we'll tell you about the app, explain some choices we made, and ask you to help spread the Ars goodness.

Why tablets?

You can already read Ars on your iPad via Safari, so why bake an iPad version? First, we think tablets are very cool and afford some innovative design choices. Our philosophy towards tablets is simple: they aren't desktop computers, and they aren't print magazines, so we needed to focus on what they do well, and avoid trying to make tablets into something they're not. The Ars Technica Reader for iPad is all about creating an intrusion-free reading experience that is clean, straightforward, and not overdesigned. The application was designed to be speedy, nimble, and relatively fast to sync.

Second, we believe that tablets are here to stay. While we've been cutting our teeth with the iPad, plans are already in the works for an Android version. Mobile visitors to Ars are generating over 2 million pageviews per month, coming from both tablets and phones (our mobile site, m.arstechnica.com/m.arst.ch, is great for phones). This is something we love, and we want to encourage it.

Identifying a single killer feature for our Reader is not easy. Based on feedback from our readers, we built the Reader to synchronize not only recent Ars content, but also your favorite content for offline reading. Heading to the dentist office where there is no WiFi? Sync up and read away. Been meaning to catch up on an epic review from last month? Flag it as a favorite, and sync it.

Mobility isn't the only draw. The app features a streamlined, tablet-based browsing experience. It follows the spirit of our Premier website design: no ads in or next to the content, minimal chrome, and content is front and center, where it should be. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks to the sponsorship with IBM, the application itself is free and it's available now in Apple's App Store. Check it out, and please let us know what you think. We'd also greatly appreciate some positive reviews in the App Store. Help spread the love for Ars Technica!

The Reader does have minimal ads, but if you are a Premier Subscriber you can log in to get the ad-free experience. Even if you don't have an Ars Technica account, you can start up a trial account with a single click and the ad-supported experience, then upgrade to a Premier account at any time.

Why the iPad?

It should be no surprise that the iPad is the most popular tablet on Ars—there is so little competition at this time. While we have plans to support other tablets in the future, we decided that version 1.0 was going to be aimed at the iPad, and the WiFi-only version at that. (3G users can, of course, use the app.) We expected that there were throngs of WiFi users wanting to take Ars with them on a plane, in a car, on a bus, or elsewhere where they have no WiFi or 3G service.

We built the application with future platforms in mind. Our application is 99 percent written using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript (technically CoffeeScript compiled into JavaScript). Our application targets the WebKit browser and will work anywhere that engine is deployed. That means we can easily port this application to future Android tablets, the upcoming RIM Playbook, and any other platform for which we see significant demand. And, if we need to, we always have the option to liberate the app from Apple's App Store and deploy it fully on the Web.

The client itself is deployed in a PhoneGap iPad application wrapper. This is not much more than a Xcode project with JavaScript hooks into various parts of the iOS APIs. PhoneGap has similar wrappers that implement the same API on other platforms (Android, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian, and WinMo). Not all of these are at the same level of quality as the iOS and Android versions, but we hope they will be soon.

The bulk of the application, as mentioned, is nothing but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The JavaScript is written in a language called CoffeeScript, which has a Ruby-like syntax and makes using the Good Parts™ of JavaScript much easier. The CSS is compiled down to JavaScript code that is shipped with the application.

One of the most liberating parts of developing this application was the prospect of targeting a single browser engine: very recent versions of Webkit. This is great because you can completely do away with JavaScript frameworks like Prototype and jQuery that spend most of their time compensating for quirks and incompatibilities between a multitude of runtimes. You can really get away with writing your own micro-framework to make redundant operations like adding event listeners, doing animations, and accessing methods like document.getElementById and document.querySelectorAll —as we did—or you can piggyback off the work of giants and use something off-the-shelf like Zepto by Thomas Fuchs.

The user interface is very simple HTML and CSS. This is great, because the Webkit team has implemented a ton of neat stuff like animations, transforms, transitions, advanced CSS3 rules like text and box shadows, gradients, and the canvas tag. They make it easier than ever to meet our designer's exacting standards and to build fast, beautiful applications without resorting to weird tricks and hacks.

What makes all of this even more exciting is that, on many mobile platforms—and certainly on the iPad and iPhone—many of these animations and tranforms can be hardware-accelerated, which results in a very native experience in a simple Web application.

To power the back-end of the application, we developed a back-end API powered by Rails and MongoDB—a speedy document-oriented database that fit our use case nearly perfectly. This gives us a ton of flexibility in how we can deliver Ars content to you. Right now, we deliver just about everything (no Etc. posts) to the iPad but, in the future, we can slice and dice our content based on tags, categories, authors, and more, to give each user of our mobile applications a customized experience.

What's even cooler is that this API has laid some really important groundwork for features that have already reached the website in the form of better formatted posts, better formatting in our Kindle and RSS feeds, and better article composition options for authors, all of which make posts more uniform. The API and its underlying service may also help us bring features like customized RSS feeds, customized front page composition, and a much improved site search engine in the future.

Developers, there's the future possibility we could open this API up to people who want to do interesting things with it. Please let us know if you think you would like to do interesting projects using our data!

What's next and how you can help (Updated)

The application we've released into the wild today is missing a lot of features. That is by design, for several reasons. We had lot of great ideas like adding a bookmarking feature to the website that would sync individual articles to your tablet, enabling syncing images for offline viewing, adding the ability to view articles in landscape format, allowing reading and contributing to comments, letting users customize the types of content to be delivered, and lots more.

What we didn't want to do, however, is to run down a lot of roads only to discover that they were dead-ends as far as our readership is concerned. We want to implement features that our readers actually want, so we're counting on you to let us know what you'd like to see in the application.

And for those of you without iPads, please contribute as well. All the updates we make here will automatically be available on any other platforms we decide to support. Also let us know if we should be looking at any particular platform or device; we want to know where we should focus our attention in the future. This application is for our readers, so we really hope to hear your feedback about where we should take it.

Please leave your feedback in the comments of this post, or if you'd like to contact us directly, shoot us an e-mail at civis@arstechnica.com.

Update! We've had some frequently asked questions, so here are some answers!

Q: Why is $flaw ruining my day? A: We tested the app internally, and Apple also tested it. Still, we know there will be bugs and jitters and various other things. Please report flaws here or to civis@ars, and give us some time to address them before condemning us or leaving a scathing review.

Q: Any plans for an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the app? A: No, not at this time. We really are focusing on the tablet experience. We may look at phones again (m.arstechnica.com, launched about a year ago, was our first effort for phones) in the future, though, and love your feedback!

Q: No landscape? A: That’s in the next version. We wanted to get something out for your review asap. Also, we chose portrait first because that’s what the stats say most people read in.

Q: Why an App for a tablet? A: A browser is still a point-and-click interface that’s run on a PC of some sort, most of the time. We believe that the tablet reading experience is different, and wanted to experiment. Most of the Ars staff that have tablets are converts to tablet-based reading.