Emily Chang – Designer

While I’ve been designing for and heavily using the iPhone and iPad, I haven’t written my own app yet. Taking the plunge by enrolling!

Just downloaded the first version of Twitter for iPad (iTunes link) and trying it out. On first glance, love the clean, properly-sized UI. Try pinch/zoom on a tweet to see more info. Pinch again to close. Swipe down with two fingers to see a thread. The “write a tweet” view overlaps a bit much for my preference, but otherwise, really liking it so far. If you’ve had the iPhone version, delete it from your iPad, then reinstall from the App store.

UPDATE 9/2: After playing more with the app, I find the sliding panels helpful, but feel like there’s too much horizontal stacking/sliding. It also seems impossible to permanently get rid of a panel detail once it’s open? You can flick it to the right but it still lingers there.

In terms of functionality, there are a few things missing from this version, although I suspect they’ll be coming in the next:

• ability to save searches
• delete DMs (and mark all as read). Actually I’d just like to see this synced across all Twitter apps so if I’ve read a DM before, it doesn’t show up on the desktop client or iPad as unread.
• geo-location for tweets
• see local trends, not just global trends

MoMA has been quick to adopt online and social media practices in the last few years, and they’ve now released the first version of their free MoMA iPhone app (iTunes link). The app gives users “access to 32,000 works of art in the museum’s wide collection of modern and contemporary art; a dictionary of art terms and a database of artist bios; calendar information for exhibitions, film screenings, and events; and a wide range of audio tours consisting of special tours for children, teens, and the visually impaired.”  I love the availability to audio tours and the ability to browse by floor or stop number.  I also like that MoMA is encouraging visitors to take their own pictures in the museum and send it as a postcard to friends.  The app will be available shortly for Apple iPod Touch devices as well as Android. I suspect we’ll see a later version with slightly different features for iPad. I’m hoping SFMoMA creates a comprehensive app soon as well, given that they’ve already started with a rooftop garden iPhone/iPad tour.

Where I live

Playing around with Google Earth for iPad (iTunes link) tonight. Great fit for the iPad with touch and swipe and zoom controls. On the iPhone, it always felt too small, but the extra size of the iPad feels perfect. Now, if Google Earth had the ability to toggle to street view, we’d be all set.

Where I surf

Ideacodes co-founders, Emily Chang and Max Kiesler, were asked for a comment by the New York Times’ Room for Debate online discussion site about the iPad two days after the debut of the first WiFi version in the U.S. The post, titled The iPad in the Eyes of the Digerati, also includes opinions from Tim O’Reilly, David Gelernter, Liza Daly, Craig Mod and Sam Kaplan. Specifically, the question asked was: “some reviews have said the limitation of the iPad is that it doesn’t fill an obvious need. Can you see the iPad as a new medium — rather than just a bigger iPhone or smaller laptop? How much does the form factor of a device (the iPad is very likely to spawn competitors) drive the creation of new types of content and affect how content is read, heard, watched, etc.?”

As I’m sure you know, tech and geek news has been buzzing for weeks about the arrival of the iPad and today was the day for pre-orders to arrive by UPS and for in-store purchasing. We went by the Apple Store on Stockton Street here in SF this afternoon and saw Jonathan Ive as he was about to cross the street. There was still a line out front, but it moved really quickly. There were tons of people in the store and upstairs they were already giving demos and classes about the iPad. Now I’m home and about to plug it in and sync up the apps I downloaded last night. So excited to use the interface and test some apps. More to come on that…

While consumers await the arrival of the first generation iPad on April 3, designers and developers have been working on apps in anticipation.

Here’s a list of free iPad templates and stencils that we’ve been using at Ideacodes to get you started:

iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle by iA

• Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements
• Text is fully editable on lists, title bars, buttons, and scroll wheels

iPad PSD GUI by Teehan + Lax

• The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it’s fully editable and scalable.
• The workable screen design is formatted to 768×1024 so anything you design in the Photoshop file can easily be brought over to the SDK.

iPhoneOS Design Stencil for iPad and iPhone by David Morford

• A stencil for designing iPhone OS applications for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices.
• Targeted at developers familiar with the default characteristics of views and controls provided by UIKit.
• The stencil shapes are all vector based.

iPad editable PSD by Kevin Andersson

• Every element you see is editable via vector masks.
• Everything is scaleable.

iPad Wireframe PSD by Neil Cowburn

• Minimal wireframe version of the iPad without the photorealism

iPad Icon Set by Chris Spooner

• The pack includes the full size graphic, as well as 256px, 128px and 64px icons sizes.

Printable iPad Template PDF by Arash Keshmirian

• The PDF is set up to print very closely to scale with a real iPad. Just make sure any options like “scale to media” are off, and the PDF is printed at 100%.

In case you didn’t hear, the much-anticipated Apple iPad was announced today.  Some notable points for me:

• New 1GHz Apple A4 processor chip
• Uses iPhone 3.0 OS
• It’s 9.7″ with a 1024×768 resolution
• Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
• Comes with 16GB, 32 or 64GB flash drive
• Choice between Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi and 3G
• Starts at $499 and goes up to $829 for the full config (64GB and Wi-Fi + 3G)
• No built-in camera (would have been great for video chat)

Will I buy one? Tricky. In terms of actual use, I don’t have much need for this first version. I already have an iPhone, MacBookPro and a MacPro Tower. I’m also trying to resist buying another first generation Apple product and wait for the second.  But of course, as an interaction designer, I’ll want to test it and explore the interactions for future projects. I’m also excited to see what design applications are adapted for iPad. OmniGroup has said that they’ll be making their products, including OmniGraffle, available as an app. So, we’ll see ;)

UPDATE: Craig Villamor and Luke Wroblewski extracted 8 minutes of video about the new multi-touch interactions on the iPad that were shown of during Apple’s unveiling.