Designing iPad Apps for Mac

Hello.

It's great to be back on stage at WWDC.

I'm really happy to talk to you guys about designing iPad apps for Mac.

Now, many of you here today have created awesome apps for iPad already, apps that help people be more productive, more creative, apps that entertain, that educate, that help people connect and communicate with each other.

We want to make it easy for you to bring those great experiences to Mac.

With keyboard and mouse or trackpad input, people can work with greater precision and speed.

Flexible windows allow for efficient and fluid multitasking workflows.

And larger display sizes allow your app to present more information and actions at once.

Of course, some iPad apps just won't make sense on Mac.

Some used cases like navigation or augmented reality aren't suitable for a stationary computer.

And apps that rely on iPad hardware features like the gyroscope or rear-facing camera won't really make sense on Mac either.

But, for the rest of you, coming to Mac is a great way to offer the people who use your app with a more efficient and immersive experience.

The first step in bringing your iPad app to Mac is to start with a solid foundation.

Your iPad app should support features like multitasking and drag and drop as well as Auto Layout.

As we all know, Mac windows can be arbitrarily resized.

By fully supporting Auto Layout in your iPad app, your interface will be resizable on Mac.

Similarly, if your app supports drag and drop, you're one step closer to having a great Mac app.

We expect just about everything on Mac to be draggable and droppable.

Now yesterday, we introduced the ability for iPad apps to have multiple windows, like drag and drop, opening documents into their own windows is something that we all expect on Mac.

If your app supports this feature, you'll automatically get multiple windows support on Mac as well, which brings me to the next topic. What do you get for free? Free is good, right? To make the task of coming to Mac easier, many iOS interfaces and interactions will automatically be adjusted to macOS equivalents.

iOS split views will be drawn as split views on Mac, system-provided UIs like the file browser and activity view will be remapped to platform appropriate equivalents.

Edit menus and iOS contextual menus will automatically be presented as contextual menus on Mac.

Copy and paste, rich text editing, and key focus all come for free as well.

Now in all of these cases, the mapping between iOS and macOS is relatively straightforward.

However, there are some key differences between macOS and iOS. Designing an app that feels appropriate for each platform involves understanding and accounting for those differences in your app.

The biggest and most critical difference is that iOS was designed for touch, whereas mac was designed for keyboard and mouse input.

Designing for touch involves offering touch targets that are larger and easier to access, especially when you're walking or moving around.

On Mac, using a trackpad or mouse provides physical stability and greater control.

And because pointers are small, people can target and manipulate interface objects with greater precision.

Smaller controls also allow Mac UIs to have greater information density or greater control density.

All iOS devices support Multi-Touch gestures like pan,