We had to disable rich-text editing entirely due to problems with CK editor and other, similar rich-text editors. Samuli and Sasha have already done quite some research and proposed solutions to work around this problem, but we haven't done anything yet.

We should find a solution to re-enable rich-text editing on the iPad (and possibly other tablets as well).

Results of testing ckeditor on iPad

• ckeditor Vaadin addon 7.8.8 (latest)
  • based on ckeditor 4.3 (latest)
• Vaadin version 7.1.8
• iPad3 iOS6

NFL Vaadin PoC: doesn't work

• toolbar is greyed out
• only by chance you get the keyboard displaying
  • you can spend minutes trying to tap on the editor body in vain
  • if you find the sweet spot, then you can enter text which is also greyish but you cannot delete it
  • could some problems stem from the fact that the widgetset was draft compiled?

CKeditor Vaadin addon demo page: very shaky

• no problem in getting the keyboard displayed
• but then it's almost impossible to select text or move the cursor to a different position in text
• entering text occasionally doesn't work
• deleting char by char works

Ckeditor official (plain javascript) demo page: works reasonably well

• selecting a text down in the page and then trying to climb up again to the toolbar e.g. to format it works a bit funky (selection remains dangling as you scroll up and down the page)
• no problem in getting the keyboard displayed
• no problem to select text or move the cursor to a different position in text
• no problem to enter/delete text

Maybe for the iPad would it be worth to use a different editor such as http://xing.github.io/wysihtml5/ which claims support for Safari on iOS 5+ and in the worst case degrades to a textarea?
Tried on the iPad3 iOS6 and seems to work fine.