Chapter 12
Making the Most of Big Screens

We’ve got a pretty nifty Twitter app at this point, one that lets us scroll through tweets, navigate into a detailed view of a tweet, and then drill down to details about the account that sent it. It’s pretty nice on an iPhone.

But, come to think of it, we haven’t tried running it on an iPad. And we did make it a universal app in the beginning. So let’s see what that looks like. Use the scheme selector in Xcode’s toolbar to change to a model of iPad—we often use iPad 2, because as a non-Retina device it fits on the Mac screen—and run the app. In landscape, it looks like this:

It’s…OK. Kind of. It’s not like any of the views are in the wrong place or anything. And it works fine. It just doesn’t take any advantage of all the extra room on the screen. In fact, it looks a lot like the Android screenshots that speakers at Apple events used to use to demonstrate how stretching a phone UI to a tablet screen doesn’t work.

So, let’s not do that. In this chapter, we’re going to take advantage of some unique options that let us use the iPad screen to a better effect, while still working the way we want on iPhone. We’ll adapt to larger screens—starting with the iPad and then the iPhone 6s Plus—so that our app can have the best of both worlds.