
IPhone Apps on the iPad - gthank
http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/iphone_apps_on_the_ipad
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glhaynes
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?"

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

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

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

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DenisM
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".

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

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baran
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.

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glhaynes
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.

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Tycho
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.

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mortenjorck
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.

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wallflower
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.

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coderdude
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?

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evgen
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.

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coderdude
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.

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ugh
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.

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mbrubeck
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.

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ugh
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.

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whopa
> 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.

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

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andrewljohnson
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.

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tdm911
Whilst I agree with your comments in most circumstances, Gruber has an
excellent track record with Apple rumours.

