Nate Weiner

This is an old archived post from my former blog The Idea Shower. It's where I cataloged my product explorations and releases, one of which ultimately became Pocket.

This post was published back in 2010. It may not function as originally intended or may be missing images.

iNeedAShorterName

February 17, 2010

I really wish someone (probably Apple) would standardize a way to describe iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps in one word.

When you talk about apps for other devices you simply say: it's an Android app, Blackberry app, Mac or Windows app.  You do not have to specifically list all of the devices that the application works on.

You could simply say 'iPhone (OS) app', but because this language is specific to a device, it can easily lead to confusion.  The last thing a developer wants is for an iPad user to see there is an iPhone app available and not make the connection they can purchase it for their iPad.  This arguably was less of an issue between the very similar iPhone and iPod Touch, but once the iPad drops into a whole new market, this will be even more confusing for the end user.  This is why you see a lot of the lengthy 'iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad' strings when describing an iPhone OS app.

screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-92956-am
screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-123017-pmWhen trying to design a clean and concise layout, it's simply too wordy, too ugly.  For example, on Read It Later's home page, I have links to all of the platforms that RIL is available on. You'll see I have 'Add to iPhone/iPod'.  I'm not looking forward to squeezing in 'iPad'.  Same problem with the main navigation at the top where I list the major platforms: 'Firefox, iPhone, Mobile, All Browsers'.  When designing that I gave up on including iPod, but now that the iPad is imminent, I feel like it will need to be squeezed in there as well.