Edible Apple

Joe Hewitt is the all-star developer behind the immensely popular Facebook app for the iPhone, and over the past few months, he’s had his fair share of gripes about the way Apple runs the iTunes App Store – which ultimately led him to abandon all iPhone development. Still, Hewitt opines on the recently announced iPad and seems to be genuinely thrilled with what the larger screen real estate will mean for developers.

I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social networking website into a handheld, touch-screen form factor. My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I’ve developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment, and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.

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iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.

You can check out his full impressions of the device over here. It’s well worth a read.