I got several email from my readers, asking why choose iPad.
Michael from Oregon dropped me a line as below “There have been lots of tablets or MIDs before the iPad. Why no one pick them up?”
Yesterday I found one post in gizmodo written by Matt, which answered Michael’s inquiry ” Those tablets weren’t as beautiful or well crafted, but that wasn’t why we chose not to pick them up. It was the software.”.
Yes, iPad is iPad because of the software.
Those who call the iPad “bigger iPhone” ignore one simple fact: changing the screen size really does change everything. Yes, everything changes. It’s more than the difference between SD and HD, between 5 1/4-inch action figures and 10-inch scale, between vegan facon and real pork belly. In a word, “The iPad functional objective was to make the product as invisible as possible, a simple, elegant stage for the real important actors: The applications.”
iPad’s Interface
The iPad looks familar to iPhone/iPod users, with a grid of glossy icons—touch one, and the app balloons out of nowhere to fill the screen. It’s a simple, slick and natural interface designed to be manipulated entirely with your fingers, and the basic elements of all translate, just on a slightly grander scale.
Speed. Speed matters. When the hardware disappears, and there’s just software in front of you, speed is what makes the verisimilitude of directly manipulating whatever’s the on the screen bleed into the sublime. It’s the responsiveness that makes you feel like you’re actually zipping around a map, not swiping at a screen that’s merely interpreting electrical signals generated by your fingers into commands. The second “wow” moment—after you turn the iPad on and the screen bursts to life—is when you flick through a entire web page with a single swipe, instantly and smoothly.
One of the ways it’s fundamentally different from the iPhone is that the interface and software are now truly designed to be used equally in both portrait mode and landscape. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not—it gives power to the idea that you can use it however you want, that it’s really a blank slate that morphs to become whatever you want it to be. It’s remarkably proficient at figuring out exactly how you’re holding it, and the software gracefully, speedily adjusts itself accordingly, rolling into position. All of the core applications—Safari, Mail, iPod, Notes—shift into new layouts, optimized for whichever way you’re holding it. It feels so natural so quickly that you simply expect it to be the case, so when third-party applications don’t remold themselves to how you’re holding the iPad, it’s jarring.
Two new user interface conventions in particular transform apps to make real use of the extra space with either more information density or greater focus: Split view and popovers. (Twitterific isn’t a native app, but it shows off both here.) Split view appears in landscape orientation, and presents two windows panes—typically, on the left is navigation (your various inboxes in Mail, music sources in iPod, all of your notes in Notes) and on the right is whatever you’ve selected (a message, an album, a note). On the iPhone, this would be two distinct screens—you click on something in one pane, and suddenly you get the other pane—drilling down instead of working in parallel. Many apps, particularly ones that are using mail as a UI model, like Instapaper, use this.
Popovers, a kind of contextual pop-up dialog box layered on top of whatever you’re looking at, are in almost every app. Completely contextual, they can act as navigation panes (like when Mail’s in portrait mode, a popover shows all of your messages or inboxes); or typing a URL in Safari, a popover will appear, showing suggested URLS based on your history; or a scrolling list; or as a navigator to pick out a photo to load into iWork. It’s a second layer, one that never existed on the iPhone because there isn’t enough space.
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