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?"
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] glhaynes|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taitems|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwilliams612|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allenbrunson|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] baran|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] glhaynes|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tycho|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortenjorck|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallflower|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coderdude|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|16 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tdm911|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hboon|16 years ago|reply