The iPad 3 and the annual thrill of the icon update…

This is the day: The day the new iPad is unveiled to an expectant world… and the day independent iOS developers finally see how much work is ahead of them in the next couple of months.

When the first iPad was released in 2010, iPhone developers everywhere scrambled to adapt their existing iPhone/iPod titles to the large screen (assuming they thought it worth their trouble). It didn’t take long for most to realize that supporting both existing handhelds and the new large-screen format was going to become a fact of life for future development projects.

And then came the iPhone 4… with its sexy retina display and significant speed increase. Suddenly, there was yet another “new way” to do things: Not only did developers need to include graphics for iPhones and iPads within their universal apps, but they actually had to include two different sets of graphics to support both older and newer handheld models. Still no big deal, really, and if nothing else, it spawned a cottage industry of niche apps designed to do nothing but resize images appropriately.

And now comes the iPad 3, with its promise of retina display, too – and with it, yet another high-resolution image to add to the standard app bundle. Sigh…

Time to crank up Photoshop/GIMP/whatever and start resizing those tiny little graphics again.

Sure hope you had them saved in at least 2048×2048 resolution. :p

About Mike Fahy

Co-founder and Lead Technical Developer

A veteran of both print and digital publishing, Fahy has earned top recognition and international awards for his work in delivering both technical and consumer-oriented content to Web, mobile and traditional media.

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