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1337

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5

Following iPad's announcement and its SDK (iPhone SDK 3.2), porting apps to iPad becomes an important issue. What guidelines I should follow in my iPhone apps to ensure I can port it to iPad as seamlessly as possible?

The different resolution is particularly an important issue. While the iPad runs iPhone apps unmodified, it's not really the desirable behavior for a native app. How can we make our iPhone apps resolution-independent so that they can run gracefully on all resolutions like most desktop apps?

A: 

Nothing, it appears. Although we don't have the SDK quite yet. It will all existing run iPhone app without an issue, albeit at reduced resolution.

It remains to be seen how much of the existing iPhone SDK is shared with the iPad SDK UI wise.

Squeegy
A: 

Judging by what has been said, absolutely nothing. You will have to adapt to the new screen size and better hardware all together, if you want to take advantage of the features that the improved device offers. The lack of a 3g module is also something to consider if your app(s) rely on that functionality.

code_burgar
There **is** a 3G module.
Mehrdad Afshari
Actually, there *is sometimes* a 3g module.
aehiilrs
The 3G module is optional. But that is almost like the iTouch/iPhone discrepancy now so probably not a big issue...
envalid
@aehiilrs How is is that different than current iphone OS devices?
prestomation
It's not, and I never said it was. I was just disagreeing with the wording in the comment above mine.
aehiilrs
+18  A: 

If you've been using IB and setting the resize behaviors of elements properly, and also coding frame coordinates all relative to each other you are half-way to having a UI that can potentially scale to a larger screen.

From the screen shots there are new kinds of action-sheets as well, potentially attached to UI elements instead of floating - if you use overlays today they will probably work about the same but you may want to consider changing placement from the center on larger display.

UPDATE:

Now the event is over, and registered developers can download the SDK - although we cannot talk about specific features here just yet, read through ALL of the documents related to the new OS version as there are a number of things aimed at helping you transition to supporting both platforms. Also before you start using custom libraries for things take a look through the API changes to see what new abilities might be supported that are not today.

Generally speaking, what I said above about IB holds true, and also you should start thinking about how your apps today could use more space to present more information at once instead of being split out over multiple screens. Also if you are doing any projects right now that use images, make sure to initially design the images large enough that you can also use them for higher resolution tablet applications.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner
Great update. Can't upvote twice though.
Mehrdad Afshari
+4  A: 

It is far more reasonable to expect users to input text (and larger amounts of it) than with a non-iPad device.

gerry3
Also as noted in the store and elsewhere it can use a Bluetooth keyboard so that makes heavy text entry apps practical.
Kendall Helmstetter Gelner
A: 

The iPad 3.2 SDK is in Beta. As such, it's in NDA and should not be discussed here. If you have questions about the iPad information, please go to the Apple Developers Beta forum and ask there.

John Wang
We didn't talk about iPad apps specifically. It's about iPhone apps being designed so that they can leverage iPad's features more easily. Specifically, independence of display width has been a feature in iPhone apps that support accelerometer for a long time. General ideas don't necessarily need iPad SDK.
Mehrdad Afshari
According to the confidentiality agreement, you can't even discuss this sort of thing on Apple's own forums (I suppose they could an exemption for this); you can only discuss it with registered developers within your own company. This doesn't prevent discussion about the already released version of the iPhone SDK, or general design principles, but it does hamper discussion about any new APIs (this NDA, along with Apple's tight-fisted control over the platform, is why I don't develop iPhone applications, or I suppose iPad applications as it seems to be the exact same program and policies).
Brian Campbell
The NDA is a pain, but Apple does have facilities to talk about prelease software in their own fora.
David Dunham