Early last month, Kevin Fox from Fury.com had noted that native iPhone apps such as Stocks, Calculator and Weather were conspicuously absent from the iPad HomeScreen and wondered if this was a pointer towards the availability of an OS X-like Dashboard that could possibly house all these "minor apps". Kevin's claims found further support from sources Apple Insider spoke to who discovered evidences in the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK for iPad that hinted at the possibility of dashboard widgets.
It now appears that these speculations could be wrong. John Gruber from Daring Fireball has quoted sources as having revealed that these apps have in fact been removed from the iPad since Apple could not create "bigger versions" of these apps to fit the iPad's larger screen. Gruber writes:
"It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who."
John Gruber has been pretty spot on with his speculations in the past. Another possibility could be for Apple to make these applications available on the App Store, much like the iBooks app. However, this is less likely considering that there are several third party apps on the lines of Stocks and Weather apps that do a great job and hence Apple's native apps may seem redundant.
What is your take on this? Tell us what you think in the comments.
[via Daring Fireball]
dang thats pretty dumb i expect more from apple
yes, why are they so stupid, but they make the iphone, which is amazing (mostly)
http://lovefreeiphone.com