Tools and Apps that target iPad
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 25 November 2010, 15:49 IST
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Bangalore: iPad, the tablet computer designed and developed by Apple is mostly known for its numerable tasks and features making it a social device. But now iPad has a different dimension .It is considered as the business booster by many executives. There are three kinds of groups among the executives who have given iPad different dimensions based on its potential and limits. Businesses are split between those who are proactively embracing the iPad and buying the devices for executives and sales representatives, those who offer IT support to individuals who have purchased iPads for a mix of business and personal use. Another group is who remain skeptical of its business value and reluctant to let it on their corporate networks. And the last group is likely to find that some employees will use iPads for some business purposes anyway, meaning that it’s probably better for IT to steer their use in a more secure and productive direction. One of the ways of making iPad a Business purpose gadget is by the applications that it uses. Citrix Receiver client which is a free application on the Apple App Store works on a remote access technology that is compatible with the XenDesktop desktop which opens up a window to your Windows applications and corporate data. This means that the software tries to finesse the differences between a PC and a tablet. Actually, it does a little more than that. Taking an application created for a PC with a large screen and a mouse and having them work well on a 10-inch tablet. The iPad is enough of an important platform that some developers of web-based business applications are creating alternate versions of their products to bridge the gap. For example, Slide Rocket has just released a version of its web-based presentation tool that uses HTML 5 techniques to achieve all the same animation and transition effects that it normally displays in Flash. HTML 5 is the latest update the World Wide Web Consortium’s hypertext markup language specification and makes it possible to achieve more multimedia effects without the aid of a plugin such as Flash. You could create your own iPad apps, but there is a learning curve. Developers familiar with Objective C, the favored programming language for the iPad, are in short supply, although those who know Java or C++ can learn it, given time. Alternatively, you can evaluate rapid application development tools that generate the required native code for you often promising to help you create alternate versions for multiple mobile devices. Most organizations will rely on independent software vendors to figure that out. For example, although the same applications are available on the iPhone as on the iPad, the iPad versions are tweaked to take advantage of the additional screen real estate.

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