The iPad, designed by Apple ™ has gone beyond being an e-book like its predecessors, to enabling web browsing, gaming and media, and has created a new market somewhere between Smartphones and laptops.

Apple has sold 1 million iPads between April 2010 and 3rd May 2010, appealing to a cross section of users for its ability to be many things for many people. While iPad buyers can enjoy books, music, games and thousands of apps, developers are scrambling to keep up with the demand and the enormous potential this new device has opened up. The iPad supports only iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone specific applications, thus spawning a host of iPad app developers. This is specially true in the media and publishing.

Cognate works closely with our partners to design, develop and support iPad apps, including porting iPhone and Mac apps into iPads. Our consultants work closely with our partner organizations, in order to deliver the best possible results on the iPad. We use iPad SDK and optimization tools to design interesting and interactive apps that enhance the user’s iPad experience.

Porting apps from iPhone to iPad

Cocoa Framework is the application programming interface (API) used by Apple Inc for iPhone and iPad, hence applications work without a hitch on iPad. User experience however, may not be optimal since it does not utilize all the functions and real estate provided by iPad.

Cognate proposes the following methodology:

• Redesign the functionality of iPhone app from a user interface and device functions provided by iPad
• Understand customer incremental experience and identify possibilities in iPad’s framework, along with functionality, and look and feel
• Utilize iPhone source code as baseline and modify to create iPad functionality. If the iPhone app functionality is very different from iPad application, we redevelop the app for iPad platform.

Porting Apps from Mac to iPad

The Apple Mac platform utilizes Cocoa Framework, and iPad development uses this framework for iPhone – so Mac apps will have to be modified to work on iPad. The core logic from Mac apps can be reused – where user interaction is through touch framework – which has been developed using iPhone/iPad SDK.

Here is cognate’s approach to the issue:

• Retain existing Mac look, feel and functions
• Identify additional features and limitations for iPad. (Features include ability to use GPS as a function, and the inability to provide Flash as a limitation.)
• Utilize the core logic and modify the source code to add touch based interaction framework using iPhone SDK
• Modify/ add iPhone SDK based functions to take care of functionality additions and limitations

iPad apps development for publishers

Cognate is aligned with reputed partners to offer media and newspaper companies interactive apps to enhance user experience for their customers. Cognate builds highly usable and exciting iPad applications for magazines, such as flipping pages instead of scrolling and helping monetize content easily, doing away with traditional online versions.