Neil Inglis

Speaking of Sleeps to Christmas 2, here’s a quick tip for quickly putting together an iPad version of an app. I don’t think this is an original idea but I’m not sure where I saw it.

The key thing to realise is that if you already have retina display artwork for the iPhone 4 in portrait mode then that’s usually 640×920 pixels. An iPad’s display in portrait is 768×1004. Only a 128×84 pixel difference.

See where I’m going with this?

Yes, you ask your friendly illustrator to make you a frame for around the artwork!

Like so…

Before frame added

After frame added

And then all you need to do is add a toolbar where each button shows the view controllers from your iPhone version in a popover, telling it to hide the navigation bar on the view controller if we’re on an iPad and you’re done.

View controller for the iPhone, full screen

Same view controller but shown on the iPad

Creating a (admittedly simple) iPad version of Sleeps to Christmas 2 took about a couple of hours of artwork and less than one hour of coding. I’ll likely work on a better port in the future but for now this was good enough that I was happy to ship it as a 1.0.

Filed under:
Development, Mac, iOS, iPad, iPhone by admin