A handy utility from
Shaun Sullivan at
Blackbaud Labs
Note, this is a free, unsupported utility. Please do not contact Blackbaud for support. If you have any questions you can email me personally at shaun.sullivan@blackbaud.com. Thank you.

Built using the powerful
Adobe Air, Flex and Flash platforms, iBBDemo 2 is a no frills, cross platform desktop application that can be used to test Web applications and Web sites to get fairly accurate approximation of how they would function on iPad and iPhone devices. It can also be useful if you are doing a presentation on a non-Apple machine and need to demo HTML Web Apps and Sites that target the iPad.
Some key features, including appropraite user agent emulation by device, hot key switching between both devices and orientations, zoom support, toggle for Adobe Flash support in pages (ultimately I'd like to get Android support in here too), auto page scale in iPad portait mode and more!
Note it is not a perfect simulation, but in general by using the WebKit engine you'll get a decent approximation. It can be quite useful if you need to do a presentation on a Windows or Linux machine, demostrating iPad and iPhone Web apps and sites as well.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Function | Key Combo |
Activate iPad Simulation | CTRL-1 |
Activate iPhone Simulation | CTRL-2 |
Change Orientation | CTRL-RIGHT/LEFT Arrows |
Zoom in | CTRL + |
Zoom out | CTRL - |
Scroll Content | Mouse wheel or click on content and use arrow keys |
Enable/Disable Flash Support (defaults OFF) | CTRL-SHIFT-F **Experimental/Flaky feature :) |
iPhone - Show Address Bar | Mouse over the top of the phone |
iPhone - Toggle Address Bar | CTRL-D |
Misc Notes
- You must download and install the Adobe Air 2 Runtime in order to run iBBDemo. It is a very quick and small download.
- Cross platform, runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS (Though on the Mac I suggest you use the iPad simulator that ships with Apples latest XCode and iOS SDK.
- The iPad and iPhone user agents are applied dynamically, so iBBDemo will be detected as the appropriate device for sites or applications that have special functionality to do so (ESPN for example).
- Content scaling - In portrait mode, content is dynamically scaled to match the iPad as closely as possible. This is not perfect by any stretch.
- Known Issue - Only standard WebKit HTML5 and CSS support is included, no iOS/Safari specific extensions are emulated.
- Known Issue - In portrait mode, the iBBDemo UI requires a pretty big desktop resolution (same as Apple's iPad emulator)
- Known Issue - Simulated keyboard animation does not occur when typing into input fields in the HTML content.
- Known Issue - Some sites' video may not play properly depending on how/if they are doing iPad detection.