iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Figuring Out What Makes a Great iPad Application

You use the same software development kit and much of the same code to develop iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch applications. The iPad runs the same operating system as the iPhone and iPod touch. However, the iPad is a bigger device with more horsepower and a larger display, as shown in Figure 1-1.

For many iPhone/iPod touch app developers, the iPad’s larger display alone changes everything. Apple demonstrated exactly how much things have changed when the company demonstrated the iWork suite of productivity tools (Keynote for presentations, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Pages for word processing and page formatting) on the iPad, which would be unthinkable for today’s iPhone or iPod touch. And then it demonstrated it again with iBooks2 and its interactive textbook initiative.

Figure 1-1: The iPad runs iOS (left) and offers a larger display to show content such as a newspaper (right).

The biggest challenge in making a killer app for the iPad is to design for the iPad experience, and one reason the iPad offers such a better experience than any Windows netbook or tablet computer is its sex appeal (which for many apps can mean more excellent content and finer style). For example, according to Douglas Adams, the Encyclopedia Galactica describes alcohol as “a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars” and also notes ...