New apps take shape for the iPad

With 60 days until Apple’s shiny new iPad hits the streets, iPhone app developers are racing to ensure their apps take full advantage of the new device.
Apple has already posted a beta of the updated iPhone SDK 3.2. Available to paid-up members of the iPhone Developer Program, it includes an iPad Simulator for the Mac plus details on how to tap into the new features of the platform, and Apple-sanctified guidelines to designing for the iPad UI.

The new apps will be packaged as universal binaries which will automatically load the appropriate version of the app for the device it’s installed upon.

Not all apps will need to be reworked. The iPad will support “virtually every iPhone app, unmodified, right out of the box” claims Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior veep for iPhone software.

The iPad offers two compatibility modes for iPhone apps. The first is as a native iPhone app running at iPhone resolution in the centre of the screen (as seen below), while the rest of the display goes black – in effect, you’re seeing an iPhone’s 320 x 480 pixel display surrounded by a big fat black border.


The second is called “pixel double” (shows above) and upscales the app to the iPad’s full screen size, although the result is less elegant.

However, Apple is hoping that just about every iPhone developer will take the opportunity to revisit their apps and consider a revised layout and UI which is optimised for the iPad.

So which apps will be best suited to the iPad? Any program which needs maximum screen real estate, for starters. It’s certain to be a boon for the likes of Google Maps.
Today’s launch included a demo of a revamped New York Times app which is a much closer analogy to the newspaper ands its Web site than the necessarily streamlined iPhone app.

The iPod library (below) is also a bit more akin to iTunes on the Mac OS X.

The increased screen space not only permits more data to be presented in a single view, it allows for context-sensitive pop-up menus (below) and separate notification areas.



For its own part, Apple sees its trio of iWork for iPad apps – which are being offered individually at US$9.99 each – as poster children for smart iPad-centric design.


Pages for the iPad (above) shows how drop-down menus can be used, while Numbers for the iPad (below) includes an oversized input pad for entering values and building formulae.


Some developers will follow Apple’s lead and rethink their app’s entire approach to how it presents data. The iPad’s Address Book and Calendar are prime examples of this.

The month view in Calendar (below) is made far more useful on the iPad’s 9.7 inch display


Many apps will likely make use of the split-screen model which Apple has adopted for the iPad’s Mail software. This runs a list of emails in the Inbox down the left third of the screen, while the right two-thirds is used to display the currently active message.

At the other end of the scale, simple utilities which consist only of a handful of slide switches or status indicators (such as a weather panel) will have no need for added elbow room. We hope their developers resist the temptation to fix what’s not broken by rejigging their apps to fill all the available space with superfluous content or, worse yet, advertising.

There are some utilities where the iPhone’s smaller screen is quite sufficient – currency converters and calculators, for example.

But apps which have previously relied on a series of tabs to accommodate all their content — such as programs which convert not only currency but temperature, distance, weight, volume and area – could now fit all of this onto a single panel, divided into the same logical groupings as the tabs previously provided.

Game developers will also be keen to use full-screen mode for a more immersive and graphically richer experience, along with larger and more complex user controls.