VisualDesign

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  • iPad devsugar: Letting go of iPhone visual design patterns

    by 
    Erica Sadun
    Erica Sadun
    02.01.2010

    The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels. That's way more room to work with than the iPhone gave you. And because of that room, it's time to re-think the way you designed iPhone applications. Things that worked well with the iPhone's limited space -- things that were meant to expand the device's virtual world beyond the screen's tiny reality -- are the things that you need to readdress and confront. Why keep using visual tricks when you can expand into real pixel space? Take the traditional UINavigationController class for example. Its entire role on the iPhone is to provide the same kind of tree view used in Mac OS X's Finder windows (View > As Columns, Command-3). The animations as you select and push view controllers and the back button are both there because you can't reasonably see an entire tree structure at once, in columns, the way you do on a Mac.