Magical, revolutionary, and very difficult to get how great it is without having it in your hands. That’s what Steve Jobs said, right?… And how does he expect his fellow developers to create apps for this before the iPad comes to market if he doesn’t spare units to developers?
AppleInsider reports only a very few selected companies got the iPad, and they had to agree to keep the Apple tabled hidden in a room without windows (no kidding!) and never show it to their grandma.
All others, like us, are just left out of the game, and people around the globe are inventing apps for a device they never saw. Well that’s what I’m doing now at least. So just how big is this iPad thing?
I figured I needed to “feel” how big the screen will be and how “small” images will look on it. If you’ve ever seen an iPhone app running on the simulator and have even the smallest sense of aesthetics you realized that “what you see is not exactly what you get”: objects on the mac screen are significantly bigger then what they appear on the iPhone.
The iPad does not use the same screen resolution and dots per inch of the iPhone and the simulator in many cases scales down the image on the screen to 50% (in order for the iPad to fit vertically within the screen resolution) so the difference will be even more.
Bottom line, I got an image from the web, I got the iPad physical size from Apple’s website and I’ve come up with this… a fake iPad I printed out and cut to play with and sketch over it in order to prototype the app and have a sense of the physicality of the upcoming Apple product.
It does feel a lot bigger then it looks from the pictures, in fact the device is almost as big as my white MacBook display. The MacBook screen is small for everyday design and coding tasks, but it’s great screen real estate if you think it’s on an iPhone OS device. I look forward to design my first app for this new “creature”.