Below are some screenshots of the new iPad simulator. To use it you will need to install the latest Beta SDK that was announced yesterday, along with the announcement of the new iPad.
To get your app to work in the iPad simulator you will need to do a couple of things:
Switch your build to: Simulator 3.2 | Debug
When your app is running in the simulator, select: Hardware / Device / iPad
Universal Applications
The above was just to get you started and see your app running on the iPad in what I call a “boxed” version. Ideally you would want to work towards what Apple refers to as a “universal application” – that is optimized for whichever device it happens to be running on. Though Apple notes that universal binaries won’t be available in the initial seed release of 3.2. See the Beta doc for more info.
Creating a true iPad target
To turn an existing app into a native iPad app, right-click on your target and select: Transition. Then change your target executable to the new iPad version. Note that right-clicking on the iPad target and selecting Build “…-iPad” Start doesn’t work if the wrong target is selected in the IDE dropdown. Your app will still appear as a boxed iPhone app. Once you have it running as a true iPad app, if you hard-coded a few things based on the original iPhones resolution, you’ll have some cleaning up to do.
Just one more thing …
When working on a 17″ MacBook Pro, I found that the simulator crowds the dock on the bottom of the desktop. So you may want to consider moving your dock to the side.
Default iPad Simulator in Landscape Mode
iPad Simulator running standard iPhone app – notice 2x option in the lower right corner
iPad Simulator running standard iPhone app at 2x resolution
As I’ve mentioned before, my background is in software testing. I’ve made a career out of making software crash. You may think your app is flawless – that it can’t possibly crash. Wait until you hand it off to someone else. If that person is sitting right next to you, you may be able to walk through the steps in the debugger in the simulator and figure out what happened. But if that person is someone who downloaded your app from iTunes – or worse, a whole lot of people who bought your app from iTunes – and it only crashes on the actual device – then things will get a lot more complicated.
Reproducing a Crash
When a professional software tester, such as myself, crashes a product our job is to try to reproduce the crash and write up detailed steps on how we did it. But when the product crashes in the field customers aren’t so helpful. Quite often they will tell you that they have no idea how the product crashed, or they don’t have the patience to try to reproduce it. Hopefully you will at least be able to get them to give you a log. What log is that you may wonder? Is this something that you build in to your product? It could be – but I’m talking about the crash log that the iPhone will (hopefully) generate automatically and replicate to their desktop via iTunes.
A great article on where the crash logs are located and how to process them can be found here:
In that article you will find out how to use a very useful tool: symbolicatecrash . Pay close attention to the instructions on generating and keeping a dSYM file when you release an app.
I noticed that I still get a lot of hits from sites containing old articles on Flash / ActionScript that I wrote. I’m sure those people are wondering where the Flash stuff went. I haven’t given up on Flash. I just decided to make my main focus the iPhone. In fact in my spare time I’ve been working on porting some turtle graphics code that I wrote in ActionScript to the iPhone. I’ve also been experimenting with writing apps for both the iPhone and Adobe AIR – which is a subject for another post.
Anyway, as you can see from the video, soon you will be able to create apps in Flash – then export directly for the iPhone. As the video points out, they aren’t talking about a browser plugin (since there isn’t one). These are native self-contained apps that you can post and buy from iTunes.
