The iPad Has Been Unveiled - Now What?

Posted by James Keller on 28 January 2010 @ 11:33 PT

As a veteran of agency life, I can say that being an iPhone™ OS-driven agency brings with it a unique set of hurdles - namely, that we have hitched our wagon to Apple’s pace of innovation, which includes newly accessible features with every new release of the OS, and sometimes, like yesterday, a whole new device.

As with all great things in life, this pace of innovation is the thing that gets us up and into the office each morning, but at the same time, it presents the most formidable challenges - creating the need for both our little business, and our client’s businesses, to stay nimble, aware and enthusiastic.

Getting Comfy with Our New Tools

Now that we have finally emerged from the post-launch haze, the Small Society team has downloaded the new Software Development Kit (SDK), the new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), and run our existing apps through the paces in the iPad simulator.

We are taking a hard look at how well our apps will scale, and which of our clients might benefit from making custom iPad™ experiences.  Of note, we are under NDA with Apple, as are all developers - so we can only say so much about  what the future holds - but we wanted to share with you our thoughts around what details are already in the public realm.

While technically all iPhone apps will work “out of the box” on the iPad, that does not mean that most apps will look great, or even make sense when blown up to twice their natural size on a new device.

iPhone Apps Will Work Out of the Box, But is That a Good Thing?

The fact of the matter is that for most iPhone apps, there are two tricky areas that dominate the planning process.  The first is what we tend to call “mobile context usage” - which simply means, what is the user doing on-the-go?  What features will differentiate this experience from what you might traditionally do for a user on your website (who is tethered to a desk and/or wifi)?  The second question is usually one of the feature to pixel ratio.  With such a small screen, feature clutter is deadly.

Both of these problems become far less important for the iPad.  We do not anticipate that people will be using their iPad while walking down the street or standing in line at the grocery store.  We also have twice the pixels to play with… and thus, many (non-game/non-immersive) iPhone applications will not “feel” right on this new device.

The Argument For Creating iPad-Optimized Experiences for Existing iPhone Apps

Apple, themselves, mentioned that they re-wrote all of their own apps specifically for use on the iPad - and if you look at the interface choices they made, a pattern about how to do this becomes clear.

On the iPhone, users are very used to drilling down from a list view into a content view, and then often toggling between these two views to compare items, or merely to work their way down through a stack of important content.  You see variations on this paradigm from news applications, to mail, to shopping applications.   This makes sense given the pixel constraints of the iPhone, but it is a bit of a burden with a larger screen.

As evidenced by the iPad mail application demonstrated in yesterday’s announcement, Apple is leveraging a split view for iPad apps, where the familiar list view is available on the left, and where the message content is available on the right.   This is actually more akin to what most users are used to seeing in desktop mail applications, and makes sense to most users almost immediately. The iPad’s split view makes the best use of the pixels available, and uses the gestural based interactions that existing iPhone users know and love.  It truly is where traditional computing and iPhone meet in the middle.

It is of note that there are further considerations for optimization (a greater emphasis on re-orientation of the device being but one example) - but they are mostly secondary to rethinking this split view approach for most applications.

From a Technical Point of View

For sanity’s sake (and because of our NDA with Apple) we won’t get into the deep technical nitty-gritty here. (Although you can certainly hire us if that sounds fun!)  But, there are a few technical notes that are public knowledge that are worth mentioning here.

First of all, the iPad does run the iPhone Operating System (OS), and our development team is thus already amongst the best in the business in terms of technical acumen necessary to build iPad applications.

Also, with the release of a new version of the iPhone OS to support the iPad, there are a number of new features that are available to us as developers.  This means that even existing iPhone apps (whether or not optimized for the iPad) stand to benefit from the technology behind this announcement.

Next, the split-view approach to an iPad optimized experience is in many ways, simply taking two views that have already been built for an iPhone experience and presenting them side by side. This means that for any existing iPhone application, we should be able to leverage existing code to build an iPad experience more efficiently.

Lastly, it is important to note that we can bundle up one universal app that contains both the iPhone and the iPad optimized views - which is what we believe most consumers will come to expect.  There are a few exceptions to this rule, as we saw with the New York Times demo, where sister apps that sync with each other may be most appropriate… but out of the gate, I doubt this will be the dominate paradigm.

The Case for Making iPad Apps, Whether or Not You Have an iPhone App

We’ve already talked a lot about the relationship between iPhone and iPad apps, but the citizens of Small Society also believe that the iPad does signal a pretty major shift in the traditional computing paradigm.

We cannot help but notice that Apple is offering a pretty compelling and affordable replacement to casual computing (previously defined by a low-end, mouse-driven PC with a cheap internet package).  Many of us at Small Society have come out of a desktop software development and believe that the iPad has the potential to redefine this casual computing category.  With it, we also believe there is a huge opportunity to innovate.

Part of this is rethinking desktop software for gestural-based interactions.  Another aspect is simply rethinking what software means for the average household, when it is more location-aware and reliably/consistently networked.

We got into this business because of a common belief that the iPhone OS is fundamentally shifting the way every day people interact with the world around them… and we are thrilled that Apple’s vision is continuing to evolve, and that our business will evolve right along with it.

So… Apple upped the ante again.  Do you have an idea?  How can we help?

More Resources from Apple:
Watch the Keynote
Learn about the iPad

A Great Overview of the iPad from the New York Times, with a quote from Small Society’s very own President - Raven Zachary:
iPad Blurs Line Between Devices

A Sneak Peek at the Small Society Team During Yesterday’s Keynote,
Glued to our Screens: