With all the noise about the new iPad I’d have expected to hear someone talking about a slight disadvantage for us here in the UK and the diversity and the developer challenges that it brings. Instead people seem to prefer to moan about pointless stuff like the name or the absence of cameras. Anybody with even a hint of marketing would realise that it’s iPod and iPhone so iPad is right in there. The idea of putting a back-facing camera on had me laughing as I was visualizing people putting hoods over their heads like old plate cameras. Front facing camera might be neat, especially given that huge bezel, but currently there are no Apple-branded services that would make us of it immediately.

For those who haven’t looked closely, as described on the Apple UK website, there will be no iBooks support here. That’s right - an book reader with no books. Clearly this is due to not having content licensing agreements in place for the UK and no some evil Apple plot, but it surprised me that they aren’t getting global licenses from day one. Maybe even the mighty Apple can’t get the publishers to agree to that.

However moving on to the challenge of diversity. When I first downloaded the iPhone SDK I was mortified to see the sample code using literal constants for screen width and height. That reinforces the line that there will only ever be one screen size on the iPhone or iPod touch, but is fundamentally bad software engineering. We all know that things change, so it would have been good practice to provide methods that returned screen size even if they were constants.

So now the four-of-them-taped-together model comes out with a four-times the area screen. Ok, so apps can run with pixel doubling, but that’s not going to look nice. Brand managers will weep as they see steppy versions of their logos and graphical designers will sigh at what’s happened to their luscious creation.

How much better would it have been to think stretchy in the first place? The UI designer tool works in relative terms anyway so that shouldn’t have  been an issue. So now some number of app developers are going to be running round making their iPhone apps iPad aware and behave accordingly.

But how many of them will take, or be allowed to take, the opportunity to build a proper iPad app? This is a very different device and really opens opportunities for spectacular new app styles. This really is direct manipulation - right there at the ends of your fingers. Note: fingers. Not a stylus. Ever since getting my first touch-based phone, a Sony Ericsson P990i,  I used my fingers to work with it. This is completely natural, and is likely to become the key modus operandi of casual interaction. Serious text input will always need a real keyboard or voice recognition, but only a tiny minority of us actually need that.

When the original iPhone came out I wasn’t excited. Despite the hyperbole, it isn’t really that interesting a platform. It has since become much more interesting, but primarily due to the millions poured into smart marketing.

In the case of the iPad, I’m excited about it despite the endless stream of superlatives. This is a product that doesn’t need talked up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.