Playboy has just released iPlayboy, a web-based collection of every issue from December 1953 to June 2011 (and beyond). For a fee, you can flip through the very first issue to see where it all began, you can marvel at the advertisements and hairstyles of bygone eras, and if you're a SIGGRAPH nerd you can get in touch with your favorite test image.

I, along with my compatriot Aseem Kishore and the folks at Applied Information Sciences, made the iPad version of this web app feel as smooth and interactive as a native app, using touch events, hardware accelerated CSS transforms, and plenty of custom JavaScript. It's certainly not perfect (yet!) but I'm quite pleased with how well you can swipe, pan, and zoom through hundreds of high-resolution pages per issue. As a way to get around 130,000 pages of content, it's pretty good.

The buzz for the site has been phenomenal, and the quantity of subscriptions already has well surpassed expectations. Most of the reviews have focused on the web app approach as a way to get around Apple's nudity restrictions, which of course is a valid concern, but there are a number of other advantages as well. For one, going through the web, Playboy doesn't have to give Apple 30% of their subscription revenue. It's also easier to support a wider variety of devices, and it integrates better with people's existing modes of sharing, allowing the word to spread faster.

Of course, all business concerns aside, I just enjoy working with JavaScript, so I'm pleased to see its potential continuing to come to light. Hopefully this will be the first of many magazines to make the leap into the world of native-feeling web apps. If Bondi Digital (the folks behind iPlayboy) have anything to say about it, there certainly will be more.

I figure it actually makes sense that Playboy would be leading the way. It shouldn't surprise us that Hugh Hefner, a man who's fought plenty for the First Amendment is now joining in the Open Web fray, in his own way.