From iPhone to iPad | Hacker News Reader

From iPhone to iPad

jackg.org

35 pointsfrockwearer11 comments

The Android Developer site has a pretty old and still relevant article about designing for tablets and handhelds: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/tablets-and-han.... I particularly like the idea of splitting functionality into "fragments" that get displayed differently based on the screen size.

This figure has always been a reference point to me: http://developer.android.com/images/fundamentals/fragments.p...

If you haven't done any design/development for iPad, it is a very different experience from that of the iPhone. I think Jack does a pretty good job of explaining that difference here. You really can't approach it with the mindset of "Just scale everything up!"

> When I go the ‘My Trips’ tab I’m hit with marketing modules telling me about fare specials and the glory of the Delta Sky Club. These have nothing to do with My Trips.

Although I agree that it feels like they originated in the marketing department, I don't agree that they have nothing to do with My Trips. If you don't have any trips, you would need to book one to interact with that section of the app. Fare specials serve as a call-to-action to do that. Also, note that these modules change based on the logged in user.

There are far better examples of "filling space for the sake of filling space" in the store.

Disclosure: I know the team that worked on the app; I worked on its iPhone counterpart.

They still feel very marketing-y to me. I can imagine the email that was sent from the CMO that had these put in. How does an ad for the Delta Sky Club have anything to do with trips I'm taking.

My biggest problem, though, is with the button design. The two red buttons on the marketing modules create the strongest CTA. The strong CTA should instead be on the "Create Account" button.

> My biggest problem, though, is with the button design. The two red buttons on the marketing modules create the strongest CTA. The strong CTA should instead be on the "Create Account" button.

Completely agree. We lost that battle, sadly.

  There are far better examples of "filling space for the sake of filling space" in the store.

Like this?

  "Approach #2 is to fill the additional space with additional content. That’s what we did. We added a brief artist bio, a list of similar artists, and listenable tracks from the artist:"

Who is buying tickets to a concert where they don't know anything about the artist and don't have any of their music?

> But on the iPad, you have 8x as much screen space to fill

I believe it's 4x relative to an iPhone if you go by physical screen size

How is there 8x more space to fill on the iPad compared to the iPhone? 768*1024/320/568 ~= 4.3x.

You need to take ppi into account. The iPhone has more screen density.

That's a good point, but there's only about a 25% difference between the two.

Maybe the basis is an iPhone 4 instead of an iPhone 5? I agree that an iPhone 5 would be more appropriate, as everyone designing for an iPhone has visuals for that.

The article said "8x as much screen space", not pixels

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