The Onion has already has iPhone and Android apps, but this one's different. To create OnionTablet, The Onion decided to keep development in-house, which took less than two months. Company reps tell us this internal development was more cost-effective than outsourcing the work. Built with a thin Objective-C wrapper (written by The Onion's developers) around an HTML5 layout, the developers decided not to use any mobile frameworks except for JavaScript and CSS.
The Onion's Art Director Rick Martin extolled the virtues of the humor publication's new baby. “We find the iPad to be the optimal device for tactile, responsive news manhandling,” he says. “This app satisfies our audience’s dual-need for both shiny things and groping.”
We gave the app a try, and it works well, similar to other iPad news apps, with its orderly layout and the ability to swipe from one page to the next until you've read all the content. Our only complaint is that the startup screen sits there for a long time at first, requiring you to stare at a car ad for what seems like an eternity, even on the faster iPad 2. It's a 10-second wait, but it's quicker if you've recently opened that app and already downloaded most of the latest stories.
Take a tour of the app below with the gallery we created: