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IDESIGN THE IDESIGN INTERVIEW
Ken Case
CEO
IPAD 2 BUYERS’ GUIDE
After years of creating databases for companies
running Mac OS X’s predecessor NeXTSTEP, The
Omni Group transitioned into a developer of Mac
consumer applications, originally including ports of
popular PC games for the oft-ignored Mac platform.
CEO Ken Case has led the company’s push into iOS
development, which has seen Omni’s site refocus on
iPad apps with Mac synergies.
On Moving From the Mac to the iPad
Having ported more major Mac apps to the
iPad than any other developer besides Apple,
The Omni Group has a special knowledge of the
challenges wrought by switching from mice and
physical keyboards to touchscreens. “With the
screen size being so much smaller than a Mac,
it forced us to redesign our applications from
scratch to better fit the form factor of the iPad
instead of just porting them to the new platform,”
says Case. “It gave us the opportunity to think
about and define the core functionality of each
application that we were trying to expose to
users. We think that what we’ve learned in this
process will help us to improve our Mac apps,” an
echo of Apple’s recent Back to the Mac strategy,
which suggests that iOS innovations can be used
to improve Mac OS X Lion applications.
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“The disadvantage,” continues Case, “is that touch
interfaces are much less precise than ones that
use a mouse, so you can’t design applications
with tiny controls. The irony is that even though
you can display more information on the Retina
Display, your controls have to be so much less
precise because our finger is so much bigger
than your mouse pointer.” Even still, Apple’s
touch screens offer a major control advantage:
developers can use the whole screen, top to
bottom, for interface elements. “It’s easier to use
controls on different parts of the screen than it
would be with a mouse because it would be tiring
to move your mouse all over your computer’s
screen. Taps are much less [challenging for the
user] than clicks, so that they are more like key
strokes. Because of this, you are able to design
interfaces the user is able to incrementally move
deeper into instead of having to design wide
interfaces that are exposed to the user all at once.”