About porting iPhone apps to the iPad, and why it might not work.
With the iPad launch coming closer, and first screenshots of ported iPhone apps showing up, I'm becoming more and more afraid that many apps for the iPad are going to be not so great.
The huge addition of screen real-estate comes in handy for more complex apps, apps that display huge amounts of text, or other media that benefits from the large screen. But many of the little tools that are available on the iPhone don't really need such a large screen, and if you don't really have enough to show, chances are that your app is going to look pretty awful. The problem is, that most developers will probably port their apps anyway, because Apple doesn't offer a decent way to deliver apps with a relatively small functionality.
You can actually see this problem already on Apples iPad website. Why do you think Apple doesn't ship iPad versions of the calculator, the clock, the weather app or the stocks app? Because they wouldn't live up to Apples standards, if you'd just blow them up to the iPads screen. Another example for this is the contacts app. It sure looks good in horizontal mode, but if you rotate the iPad, you're left with ugly black borders on the top and bottom, because they didn't have any content to make use of that space.
I think this is a general problem of the iPad OS, Apple has to come up with a good solution for smaller apps, maybe some implementation of widgets. This way developers could get small apps on the iPad, without running into the dilemma of having too much screen real-estate, and users would benefit from it too, if they could take a look at a selection of smaller apps with a single gesture.
iPhone apps are looking pretty horrible on the iPad, but porting them to the huge screen doesn’t make sense for many of them. That’s why we need something in between.
