iPad: UI Implications
iPad: UI Implications
- Subject: iPad: UI Implications
- From: Phillip Mills <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:02:09 -0500
After having written a couple of simple iPad apps to investigate certain features, I'm now close to being feature-complete on my first serious application. I'm finding that the lack of a standard menu for centralizing actions is the hardest thing to get used to. As a result of that, I've adopted the seemingly reasonable policy of having custom controls or control subclasses respond to gestures and behave accordingly.
This leads to a couple of design difficulties:
1) It's not always obvious what kind of UI element or gesture is appropriate (or available) for enabling a specific action, and
2) Any desired gesture has some chance -- not necessarily documented -- of conflict with one used by a standard UI element.
(The "iOS Human Interface Guidelines" are a partial solution but they are incomplete and, by necessity, can't provide fine detail. )
At the coding level, I'm noticing that I'm using notifications far more than I would in a Mac application. In the Mac world, it's likely that an application-specific action will be recognized first by a controller (in the MVC) sense which will coordinate data and view updates in some way. With the iPad, I'm finding it more likely that a lower level object will be the natural recipient of the action and will then need to broadcast its interpretation of that. Not that there's anything wrong with that, though debugging session tend to be less intuitive, but it has required some revisions to my thinking. So far, I've resisted the temptation to replicate Mac menus using UIBarButtonItems and UIPopoverControllers. :-)
I don't have any specific questions or problems associated with this but I'm curious about attitudes, techniques, patterns, or tools that others have found helpful going from Mac to iOS._______________________________________________
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