The question everyone wanted to know about the iPhone 5 is will the larger screen affect apps and the way they are displayed on Apple’s newest device. And now developers are looking for ways to enhance their apps for better viewing on the iPhone 5.
Ever since Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, widespread speculation has held that the next iPhone would boast a 4-inch screen. For hundreds of thousands of developers, that posed a potential problem: Would their apps look strange on a bigger screen? And how would they build mock-ups when the official iOS simulator showed the old 3.5-inch display?
Such is life in the Apple developer ecosystem: You make crucial product decisions based on guesswork and design apps for devices you’ve never seen. This time around, the iPhone speculation proved largely correct. But even now, developers are tweaking their designs without an iPhone 5 in hand — and by necessity, they’re getting creative.
For Pocket, which claims 6 million users, that meant hacking the iOS simulator. Various Web sites offered instructions on how to modify the simulator so it could display the 4-inch screen
[cnet]
