IPhone Apps on the iPad | Hacker News Reader

IPhone Apps on the iPad

daringfireball.net

33 pointsgthank27 comments

Setting out to design an iPad app is a strange experience... we've always been used to having some constraints -- a window sized to just the size you need plus a title bar at the top, a menu bar either on the window or at the top of the screen, a Start menu or Dock at the bottom of the screen, etc. With the iPad it's more like "Hello, big blank canvas. How am I gonna fill you up?"

Selfplug: This is something I collected to show what other iPad developers/designers are up to: http://tumblr.com/xjl76lu8h

This deserves its own post - "what we know now about emerging iPad app design".

I tried, it sank to the bottom of the new items list sadly.

I see. I think a more audience-relevant title would do better, such as "what kind of UI design can we expect from the new form-factor that is iPad".

You could always chuck a hash tag on it and try it yourself haha.

And designing for the iPad when you only have the simulator only makes it harder. Sure, it's a giant iPhone, i can imagine what it will be like, but I don't really have a feel for how I'd hold/use it, and the design implications that has.

Why can't you make a low-fi prototype? This is probably what they did inside Apple.

I got a Notepod+ (http://notepod.net/) for this very purpose - gives a sense of the size/basic feel of the thing and provides a nice place to sketch prototypes.

First thoughts:

- it's slightly smaller than I'd expected

- the screen, though, seems large because when you're wanting to look at something closely you naturally bring the "device" closer to your face... you don't do this nearly so much with a traditional notebook

- whoa, that's a lot of screen space to fill up... I need boundaries!

- I really wish this expensive notepad could surf the web, that'd be awesome.

yeah that's a good start... but there still in no substitute for actually manipulating the UI with your fingers instead of a mouse and spending some time with the real device.

it is pretty weird. i've mostly ported my iPhone game to iPad, and there is a lot of wasted space. if this were a "regular" OS, i'd just make its window a little smaller. but i don't have any choice, i have to use the whole screen.

here's how i think it will go. i am of the opinion that apple isn't going to allow third-party apps until after the iPad has been shipping for awhile. (i have no real information to back this up. just a hunch, based on available data. if anybody knows better, please correct me.) by the time us little guys are allowed on the device, we will have experience with apple's own apps to use as design cues, just like what happened with the iPhone.

This is an important point and from a usability/efficiency point-of-view the iPhone apps will have problems in scaling up (even with increase resolution). Think about how inefficient a direct port of the weather app would be on the iPad. Also I believe the screen size is not proportional in the iPhone as compared with the iPad which will create additional porting problems.

This does represent an opportunity (or potential problem) as certain apps will need to be re-designed for use on the iPad. There is a potential for a number of apps to take over the market with reengineered designs made for the iPad.

It'd rarely be the right thing to do, anyway. iPhone apps strongly tend toward drilling down through a hierarchy of list views until hitting a full-screen (including controls along an edge) detail view. iPad apps on the other hand have a flatter hierarchy, very often showing a list view and a detail view (for the selected item from the list view) at the same time. This is why iPad apps are more likely to implement a "real materials" style of interface... they're less explicitly about drilling through hierarchies for data and more about direct manipulation of the entities the app deals with.

First thing I'm going to do with the iPad is put a wikipedia archive on it. There's an iPhone app called Encyclopedia that costs a few dollars but lets you download a complete 2.5gb page dump of Wikipedia onto your iPhone for offline browsing. I'm wondering how this app will look on the iPad - huge, blown up text? Or just broader lines? Of course, a native iPad version/equivalent will be released sooner or later.

What it (and other Wikipedia readers) really should use is the new Cocoa Touch NSSplitView to keep the table of contents visible (maybe with some kind of cool position indicator as well). Like the mail app, it could do split in landscape and pop-over in portrait.

The iPad SDK is still NDA but my impression is that the new UI components make up for the lack of multi-tasking by facilitating rapid switching/quick actions. The new Mail app - you can rebuild that using the new UI elements. The iPad is probably the first tablet computer that will matter.

How could a lack of multitasking be made up for by rapid switching between tasks? Like, if I keep rapidly switching back to my mail client from my browser and then to my music player and back again, I'll feel like I'm actually getting something done?

It means that if you are so ADHD that you bounce from app to app like a ferret on a double-espresso the hardware and software platform will not get in your way; it will enable you to accomplish nothing in a way that feels much faster than similar devices.

I asked "How could a lack of multitasking be made up for by rapid switching between tasks?"

Single-task at the speed of light for all it matters, you still never get the benefit of not closing everything you're doing just to open up the iPad's text editor.

Easy. Apps which save their state when you close them. Not a solution to all problems (i.e. playing music in the background) but to the user it doesn't make any difference whether that Spreadsheet app she just left to take a note keeps on running in the background or quits if she finds it exactly the way she left it when coming back. (As long as it's speedy enough.)

Users don't want multitasking. They may say so - don't listen to them. They want to be able to do stuff. One traditional way to let them do stuff is multitaksing. That's why they are screaming for it now. But there is no reason why the solution that let's them do stuff actually has to be multitasking. It could be something else entirely.

It matters if the "stuff" they want to do is listen to their favorite music app (e.g. Pandora) while playing their favorite game. Or let a passenger in the car look up travel info on the web while the GPS navigation app continues to give directions.

Um, yes, sure. I even mentioned that (you might have missed it). Those are problems, but you don’t necessarily have to solve them with multitasking. Or better: the kind of multitasking you know. Most apps can just save their state and quit. Some apps in some specific circumstances should keep running. The iPhone already supports that kind of multitasking (Phone app, iPod app, Voice Memo app) but only Apple can use it. I see no reason why they wouldn’t extend that to all developers sooner or later.

The iPhone and the iPad suck if you want to do what you just said regularly. That’s certainly true. But many other traditional tasks of multitasking are handled quite gracefully right now without any multitasking.

> The iPhone already supports that kind of multitasking (Phone app, iPod app, Voice Memo app) but only Apple can use it. I see no reason why they wouldn’t extend that to all developers sooner or later.

I see a reason. Apple may want to give iTunes a competitive edge over other music apps by keeping it the only music app that can work in the background. This doesn't seem out of line of Apple's character as of late.

No way to resolve this other than to wait. I don't know. Apple sometimes does strange stuff that seems otherwise out of character.

I have this rule when reading blogs.

When I read "well-informed little birdies" or "inside sources" or "people I trust," I replace that with "based on a random email I got from an anonymous source." If I read a lot of these types of statements on a blog, then I stop reading the blog.

This was usually reserved for DailyKOS and other crazy political media, but tech sites are now getting to be bad about it too, especially ones that cover Apple.

Whilst I agree with your comments in most circumstances, Gruber has an excellent track record with Apple rumours.

Gruber covers Apple-related issues much better than most journalists or professional analysts. Often accurate or otherwise, well thought out analysis.

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