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With the Internet-crushing hoopla surrounding the release of Apple’s widely anticipated iPad, not much attention has been paid to the exciting additions Apple has made to the iPhone OS to support it. Here we’ll explore some of these changes and discuss what they mean to publishers and application developers alike.

Apple designed iPhone OS 3.2 to support the iPad exclusively - so for now, the iPad’s slick new features are not available on the iPhone or iPod Touch. We’re hopeful that some of these features will slowly migrate over and Apple will release a combined iPhone OS for all devices. Luckily for those of us with large app collections, iPhone apps written for older versions of the iPhone OS should work fine on the iPad.

iPhone OS 3.2 provides applications with several new options for presenting content and receiving input from the user. As expected, Apple has introduced a new set of Human Interface Guidelines to go along with these changes. Below are the features that immediately grabbed our attention.

Popovers

A popover is a floating view that resides above the main application interface. They are designed to eliminate the clutter that might otherwise occur in applications with complex controls. You can see an example below:

The primary benefit of the popover is its unobtrusiveness. It appears only in response to specific user actions and can be dismissed when the user taps out of its bounds. This style of UI design will lead to interfaces that can become as complex as necessary for users that want to dig more deeply - but remain ultra simple for those who don’t. Popovers can also contain split views, discussed below.

Split Views

The split view is an interface element that allows developers to manage side by side content views. Typically, this would consist of a list on the left, with an action area on the right that changes based on the list item selected by the user. By itself this is not particularly innovative - applications have been designed this way for years. But by placing split views into popovers, Apple is treading new ground by enabling developers to create user interfaces that focus on quick access - and this is quite innovative. Think of it like a table of contents that can be accessed from anywhere in the application without changing screens. An example of a split view can be seen below:

As the iPad still does not support Multitasking, the benefits of the split view are confined to individual applications. We’re hopeful that as the hardware behind the iPad becomes more powerful, Apple will enable multitasking across applications. Someday, we’d like to see our favorite Mac application - Quicksilver - inspire a new generation of mobile device interfaces.

Custom Input Views

Until now, user input on iPhone OS based devices has been limited to a simple keyboard - and that could only be used with text fields. iPhone OS 2.2 gave Japanese iPhone users access to Emoji, an enormous set of emoticons popular in Japan. The interface is very similar to a keyboard. It can be seen below:

Apple’s new custom input views give developers the ability to take this sort of user input mechanism to the next level. Not only can new types of keyboards be created - developers don’t need to be confined to the keyboard model at all. We see this leading to innovative speech-to-text and gesture based input interfaces.

Gesture Recognizers

Gesture recognizers allow developers to determine what gesture a user is making on the touch screen. Before iPhone OS 3.2, developers were forced to create their own systems to handle gesture and tap recognition. This led to many apps behaving differently when the user dragged, pinched, or pressed the screen for an extended period. With the release of the iPad, Apple has (finally) wrapped the common gestures into an easy to use library. They’ve also included the most commonly used gestures from across all of Apple’s own products. This feature, along with custom input views, will likely lead to a new generation of iPad gaming apps.

External Display Support

The iPad can be connected to an external display device using a set of proprietary cables. Once connected, the external screen can be used by the iPad to display content. While the iPad itself is limited to a 1024×768 display size, the external display does not appear to be quite so limited. The external display functionality is used by the iPad version of Keynote - but without multitasking, this functionality can’t really be taken very far. Users won’t be able to watch movies on a big screen while they surf the web on the iPad, for example.

Core Text

In order to support iWork on the iPad, Apple has included a high performance text processing library in iPhone OS 3.2. This allows developers to include custom fonts and to create text layouts that go far beyond just a simple text document. In addition, developers can now extend the copy-paste widget itself. The current copy-paste widget is shown below:

By allowing developers to control how this widget behaves, Apple has opened the door to the creation of new kinds of markup. Users could use this control to make the selected text bold - or share it with their friends via Twitter or Facebook. Excitingly, there’s also a spellchecker with user submitted entries.

File and Document Support

Applications that want to share files, can now do so via a simple mechanism - a shared documents folder. When the iPad is plugged into a computer, this shared folder is mounted like a drive on the user’s desktop. An application can also register the types of files it supports, allowing apps to be automatically started when a file of the given type is opened by the user. This will be handy for users that receive many different kinds of email attachments. There are also indications that users may be able to upload files using Mobile Safari.

PDF Generation

Apple has made available native PDF generation capabilities for all applications. Users can now save application data, emails and other text or web content into a PDF file - presumably to be shared or emailed later. This will be a huge feature for applications where the user does a lot of data entry - such as a diet tracking or time tracking app.

Summary

The iPad is clearly the next generation in the iPhone/iPod product line and is aimed squarely at the growing e-reader market. Whether it will be enough to revolutionize the publishing industry the way the iPod revolutionized the music industry remains to be seen. The feature set is compelling, although the lack of Flash support - not to mention the lack of a full OS X operating system - is a significant drawback and may deter widespread consumer adoption. Still, the “Mom factor” might turn out to be the iPad’s greatest strength.

From the developer perspective, it’s refreshing to see Apple continually making available to the community at large the tools and libraries they create for their own apps. Despite the relative lockdown compared with other devices, the iPad promises to usher in a new wave of mobile innovation.

Note for the adventurous: Someone has apparently devised a way to simulate a number of iPad features on the iPhone - and even give it multitasking capabilities. If you try this and it works for you, let us know.