Flickr Find Shows How iPhone Apps Should Be Displayed On The iPad

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber pointed out this excellent alt-universe mock-up of what icons for non-universal iPhone apps should look like on the iPad home screen.

On the iPad, iPhone-only applications run in the center of the screen, upscaled twice and with the remaining display space filled in with black borders. Additionally, iPhone app icons, which are displayed at a resolution of 57×57 on the smaller device, are blurrily blown up to 72×72 on the iPad, making them look ugly compared to native iPad apps’ higher resolution icons.

This concept screen uses the fifteen pixel difference between iPad icons and iPhone icons to visually represent the black borders synonymous with upscaled iPhone apps, while keeping the iPhone icons crisp and clear.

DON'T MISS
Borders To Bring eReader And Bookstore To iPhone, iPad, OS X

Not only is it informative at a glance to the user, and not only is it more visually pleasing than the current solution, but it is in Apple’s best interests to get developers to update their apps to universal binaries as quickly as possible. Visually segregating iPhone apps from higher-definition iPad apps while maintaining a satisfying end user aesthetic experience is a great way to do it. This is one idea Apple should steal.

4 comments »