On 2nd June 2010 Vision+Media hosted an evening of discussion, drinks and demos centred on Apple’s new iPad. Organised by Pixel-Lab the evening was a great opportunity for the app development community in the Northwest, as well as those simply interested in the iPad, to get together to discuss their first thoughts of the device which was released in the UK on 28th May.
For those of you that were not able to attend the evening here is a quick roundup of the evening including the presentations from a couple of the speakers:
Dave Verwer from Shiny Development kicked things off with his presentation - iPad Interface Design.
Next up was Katie Lips from Little World Gifts who delivered an entertaining and insightful presentation – Predicting the iPad: 18 Predictions about iPad, my personal favourite of which is number 6. "iPad will let us all feel it’s ok just to consume".
Hayden Scott-Baron from Starfruit Games was next on the bill, the independent developer and creator behind the IGF nominated iPhone game Tumbledrop. Hayden discussed the opportunities introduced by the new iPad platform and also the challenges of designing games for this unique interface. One point that Hayden made that stuck with me was to remember that games designed and developed for mobile devices such as the iPhone and the iPad are typically aimed at a casual gaming audience and therefore shoehorning the latest OS features (the iPhone 4’s gyroscope for example) into your game may not be the best way to give your game the best chance of success in the App Store. Similarly integrating social features such as leaderboards into your game which you may believe will stimulate competition amongst users may in fact have the opposite effect and alienate and discourage new gamers. Think about your personal high score on DoodleJump; how good you felt when you achieved it, but then how disheartened you felt when you compared it to the overall leaderboard (my current high score is 21,484 compared to a global high score of all time of 4,196,867).
The final speaker of the evening was Guy Dickinson from participo whose presentation (delivered from his own iPad no less) focused on the iPad as a reading device. Guy delivered a fantastic critique of the current magazine and newspaper apps on the iPad App Store. Guy’s presentation notes can be found on the participo blog.
The evening concluded with a Q&A session in which the 4 speakers were joined by Claire Rogers from Spinning Head Software, developer John McKerrell, and Don McAllister from Screencasts Online to further delve into this new device.
