iPad App Development – Create iPad Apps

If you are interested in ipad app development, hopefully here you will find some useful tips to help you in your project.
As iPad is getting more and more popular among tech users, the app market is becoming a profitable place for developers.
As a helpful start, we’ve compiled a guide on iPad app development providing design, interface  building and programming tips along with some useful GUI element resources.

Market Research

The majority of iPad users come from the older demographics, with ages ranging from 30 to 54. Mostly male with a wealthy status, looking for meaningful and functional tools, especially productivity and business applications. These are followed by games, news and utilities.

Gathering information about applications and their users/customers it is vital business strategy.
Define your potential users: What is their age group? What do they have in common? What are their problems? How can you solve their issues? How can you save them time and money?
Analyze the top 5 apps in your target market segment. Differentiate yourself from your potential competitors: See what are users saying. – Search in forums and blogs for relevant reviews – Find similarities and differences in their features. What is missing? What can you improve? What value can you offer?
Sketch your ideas

Know the iPad’s Capabilities

It is important to understand and experience the environment you are working with to take fully advantage of its features and create a visually and functionally appealing user interface.
iPad gives you a larger screen (1024×768) to present your content and new classes to manage, besides iPhone’s standard ones. Here are some new features you may want to use to enrich your app:
Split view – Allows to show content in 2 panels, side-by-side. The master view(right panel) will be 320px wide in landscape mode; in portrait orientation will appear as a popover. The main content will be displayed on the left side of the screen, in the details view. This is great for replacing navigation, tabs and letting users to access more information.
How to develop split view based apps – nice tutorial by mobiForge.

Popover – Appears on-screen, on top of the existing view. It works like a dialog box or drop-down menu.
Note, it is fixed and it can’t be moved. As of closing, it disappears if the users tap away or it is provided a ‘cancel’ or ‘close’ option.
Another great guide how to use popovers in your app.

Custom keyboard – You can present a custom GUI for the keyboard layout, instead of the normal one. What is even better that you are able to add new controls. It is a  great addition for word processing apps or any other application that needs special text input.

More complex text processing- Build enhanced text editing and creating applications with features like auto correction, font management, spell checking, selection based modifications.
Ray Wenderlich offers complete instructions on how to create custom input view.

Enriched filesystem- Ability to register and support multiple file formats within your app, enhancing its functions. Supports:.doc, .pdf. .txt, .rtf, .xls(x), .ppt(x), .htm(l).vdcf, .pages, .numbers and .key.
See Document support on iPad- -Apple tutorial

Gesture recognizers – iPhone 3.2SDK easily handles gestures, like tapping, pinching, swiping, panning, rotating, long pressing.
Apple provides a useful guide on this here.

Creating Guidelines (What to take into consideration..)

Now that you’ve sketched your ideas and have a clear vision about your app, there are some standard user expectations/patterns to follow before the final development steps.
Support all orientations -When building your app make sure you make it function in both landscape and portrait mode. Here is how can you achieve that
Progressive Disclosure- Present information and offer controlling options directly related to the user’s current activity. Concentrate on the main content and hide irrelevant options until they are required. Complex, inadequate subtasks and too much information hurt user experience.
The Pages app is a great example for progressive disclosure. At first side it is a clean full-view reading app till it is presented a nice editing UI at the top, when needed.
Master Detail- Structure your app wisely. Use split view or popovers(in portrait mode) to provide additional functionality in one place. A relevant example is the InstaPaper app, which uses a split view, displaying a list of your bookmarks on the right panel and additional information next to it, about the currently selected folder.

Anticipation- Users might already associate some gestures (tap, pinch, drag) or elements to specific actions.  Create an easy to use and comfortable interface and increase learnability by avoiding the use of non standard, unfamiliar elements.
Compatibility with other application -Enhance user experience by allowing them to share or sync data with other tools. You can build your app as a mobile complement to a desktop application.
Universal Apps -These are applications that fully optimized for iPad and iPhone too.
Speed- Performance can break or make the potential of your application. Reduce calls, use light code to speed up your app.
Overall Design – Make your app visually appealing with high resolution graphics and realistic touches. People enjoy using beautifully designed tools with elements to which they can refer to. Reproduce real life objects, scenes in your application and increase engagement with the user(see iBooks or the Contacts app, offering a realistic address book) .If you are not into designing you should consider hiring a professional one. There aresome great places to look for : Coroflot, Crowdspring, eLance.

Programming

First start by joining Apple’s iPad Dev Program ($99).
With your membership you will get iPhone SDK with Xcode, interface builder, ipad simulator, sample codes, video guides, forum, and performance analyzer.
Download and install the latest version of the iPhone SDK. Note, you will also need a MAC or  MAC Mini. See iPad development on Windows
There are some great places with tutorials and guides or forums to ask for help from other developers: Apple Dev Forum, Stanford iPad App Development (HD) course, iPhoneSDKForum. or iPhoneSDK Google Group. You might want to check out the latest collection of iOS5 SDK tutorials.

Design

A beautifully designed icon can make an impact and attract users. The icon should be 72×72 in .png format with 90 degree corners and no shine, gloss or alpha transparency. For the App Store the sizes are 512×512, png.
If you are a designer, there are available some great and free GUI elements to help you get started. These can be customized in Photoshop.

• iPad GUI Psd Beautiful and fully editable GUI elements.

• iPad GUI Kit (Psd) Majority of graphics are in vector format, making it easy to customize.

• Design Stencil for iPad A handmade nice stencil, optimized for Apple’s recommended application styles.

• iPad Vector GUI Elements A huge selection of scalable vector GUI elements.

Testing

iPhone SDK offers real time application testing. See your app’s performance and experience its user interface on the iPad simulator or directly on your device.

Distribution

Phase 1 (at least 1 month before the official launch)

Start building anticipation and buzz around your application. Participate in relevant forums and social networks (Facebook, Twitter). Start a blog and build relationships with other webmasters that will/might help you in promoting your app. Build an early bird list, offer a preview of your work and ask for beta testers for your app…all this to raise curiosity.

Phase 2 (Prelaunch – 4-5 days before launch )

Now that you have a community and bloggers that might do a shot out for you, it is more easier to promote the release of your app. But this is not enough, you will have to constantly generate buzz with one time offers, deadlines, free samples. These offers can be, for example 50% off discounts or bundles with other apps. Contest and press releases can also help to raise awareness. You can submit free PRs at prlog.org, pr.com.
Making Youtube videos is another great technique to help spread the word about your app. It should be something funny and short, something that people can relate to or maybe shocking and surprising.
Use services, like tubemogul.com to instantly upload to multiple video hosting sites (Youtube, Metacafe, Revver etc.) and get more exposure. Here is a great write-up on Youtube viral video marketing tricks.

Do not forget that your application has to be reviewed and approved by Apple, so make sure you submit it in time.

Phase 3 (Launch and after launch)

Create an effective customer service and communicate with your users over email, social media sites or other networks and ask for their feedback.
Raise awareness and regularly offer new versions with required features and bonuses, discounts for potential users.

Have you developed your own app for iPad? What have you learned? What are your tips, ideas? Let us know in
the comments.