How to refactor an iPhone App to run natively on the iPad

Question

I have an iPhone application and I want to run it on the iPad in normal mode (not in the mini small emulation mode)

How do I compile my program to show up in full screen mode?

Any easy tutorial?

Answer 1

You want to refactor you current iPhone only app in to a Universal app.

iPhone SDK 3.2 [and later] supports the development of Universal applications. A Universal app is optimized to run on all iPhone OS devices—itʼs essentially an iPhone app and an iPad app built as a single binary.

More details can be found in the Introducing Universal Applications for iPhone OS documentation.

In order to achieve your design goals for a Universal application, you will need to use conditional coding to determine the availability of features when your app is running. Conditional coding allows you to make sure youʼre loading the right resources, using functionality thatʼs supported by the device and properly leveraging hardware thatʼs available.

In Xcode 4 you can set the device type, be sure to create iPad specific UI for you app.

Once you select Universal xcode will try and help you out by creating some interface-bilder files.

Answer 2

The iPhone views are created with the size 480×320px in case of pre-iphone 4, and the iphone 4 has 960x480px. The iPad has 1024x768, so you need to change the views for that size. There's no automatic way of doing it. In Xcode 4 you have some sort of "change this view to ipad", but the position of the elements in the view, but you will have to do some tunning on the final views, because the ipad UI of an App should give a different UX than the iPhone.