Drag and drop on iPad2

Is it possible?

As well as the obvious uses in word processing, I like to re-arrange the BBC Home Page, a facility I assume some here are familiar with.

A few months ago, iPad(1) days I think, I asked in the Trafford Centre Apple shop and got treated like a doddering old git . I'm not sure if that was because I'm obviously over 35 or because the assistant didn't know the answer to that or a couple of other deeper questions than "Does it do Twitter?"

Maybe even the idea of even looking at the BBC website completely blew his mind .

Drag and drop isn't really a great way of moving stuff on a touch screen. You can drop something where you don't want it if for whatever reason your drag is interrupted.

Many desktop operations don't make sense on a touch screen.

So how do you move it? That is the requirement, the method less important . You can't delete these sections from the website and insert them elsewhere.

Have you seen www.bbc.co.uk and played with it?

Well I'm saying that the browser support javascript and so websites that do it may let you drag and drop.

But there's no API for apps to do that.

The latest suggestion I've had at John Lewis is that the iPad2/Safari doesn't support Flash, and that the BBC website is Flash-based.

I have my doubts about the validity of that, but not ruling out the possibility.

Thanks for your input though .

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The latest suggestion I've had at John Lewis is that the iPad2/Safari doesn't support Flash, and that the BBC website is Flash-based.

The JL staff probably only look at the pictures

The videos on the Beeb pages are Flash, but it seems hard to believe that Safari won't play them

Not on an iPad, it won't. Flash is not supported on the iPad.

But I don't think that is connected with the OP's problem. The drag and drop aspect of the BBC Glow JavaScript libraries just doesn't work on an iPad because of the way that the "mouse" is handled. I'm afraid that Safari on an iPad, fun though it is, is not the full web-browsing experience.

It's poor programming of the site. There are vast number of people on mobile devices who won't be able to use these features.

In reply to a post by gilesjuk:

It's poor programming of the site. There are vast number of people on mobile devices who won't be able to use these features.

To be fair, we are talking about the main site. They do have an easily accessible mobile version. Just that on my only current mobile device, (Nokia N900), full-version websites are fine, Maemo version of Firefox is included, so I haven't had to bother with mobile versions of anything.

The N900 has the same problem, and I don't see it as the site designers' fault. It is simply that the device OS has no mechanism for the normal click-and-hold then drag on a touch-screen. I blame the technology, not the site. It only needs a key or key combination to lock the screen and allow drag, from the user perspective, and after that most of the code is already there.

I can tolerate it on the N900, but on a decent-sized wham-bam-"I'mTheGreatest" piece of kit I'm disappointed.

Surely it isn't beyond the wit of the programmers to cater for this sort of thing? How do you manage in the WP app? Even on these forums I use drag/drop a lot.

I'm not sure that it's reasonable to blame the BBC when only one device doesn't work with that particular version of their web site. If all web sites have to support the lowest common denominator then things will never progress.