Here’s a short, but insightful article from Minimali.st about making your application’s user interface invisible, which is a goal for interface design on the iPad. The gist of it is that users want to focus on content, not the interface, so make interface controls as invisible as possible while emphasizing the actions those controls perform. One way to de-emphasize buttons is to remove the stylistic touches (color, gradient, shadow, etc.) from less important ones and only stylize the buttons with the most important actions to draw attention to that action. Read the full article here: De-emphasize User Interface Controls.

Let’s be honest; there were two thoughts we all had at the end of the iPad unveiling:

1. “I can’t get over how much it sounds like a feminine hygiene product!” and
2. “It’s really just a big iPod Touch…”

I can’t help you with the first thought, but let’s talk about the second.

Is the iPad really just a big iPod Touch?

Yes. But that’s really not a bad thing like many people are making it out to be. The iPhone and iPod Touch have been phenomenally successful, with hundreds of thousands of applications in dozens of genres that will run on the new iPad as soon as it’s shipped. Find me another platform that has launched with that kind of support and momentum.

Also, the iPad isn’t priced that much higher than either of its ancestors, and is comparable in cost with netbooks and competing e-readers. What’s that? The iPad only costs about as much as a device that only lets me read books? That’s right! And you can do all of these other great things on your iPad:

• Play games
• Surf the web
• Listen to music
• Watch movies
• Write documents and presentations
• Just about anything else* that can be done on a netbook, laptop, or desktop computer

*For a list of things the iPad doesn’t do very well, see this article on CNET.

For those of you who are more visual, here’s a very telling infographic comparing the iPad to six other e-readers. Maybe that will sway you a bit. What do you say? Take this quick poll:

AppleInsider has posted photos from Mission:Repair showing replacement iPad enclosures with a slot for a forward-facing camera: iPad photos show slot for forward-facing video camera. Could your video conferencing dreams come true after all? My bet is that we’ll see a camera in the second generation iPad, along with software updates including iChat and perhaps facial recognition.

Gizmodo has a great (and lengthy) article by Jesus Diaz on why the interface of the impending Apple tablet will be just an extension of the iPhone interface: The Apple Tablet Interface Must Be Like This.

Here are a few of the main points:

• Desktop computer interfaces are somewhat flawed by nature: they try to do everything within the context of a single interface.
• Jef Raskin’s vision of an “information appliance” fits better with people’s natural expectations of how things should work; that is, an information appliance is a device that fits a specific purpose, such as playing music, making a phone call, or playing a game.
• The iPhone interface is exactly such an interface: individual apps have very specific purposes, and when you launch an app it becomes the interface. While you’re using that app, it takes up the entire screen and the device essentially becomes an information appliance for the specific purpose that app fills.
• Tablet-like devices in the past have failed for a couple reasons:
  1. The technology wasn’t good enough to make a truly compelling interface (resistive touch screens, vivid color displays, raw processing power, connectivity to the Internet and other devices and people, etc.)
  2. Even when the right technologies became pervasive, the interface design was inappropriately based on that of the desktop computer.

I won’t make any predictions on what differences there may be between the tablet and the iPhone, but I do think Jesus has it right: the natural interface for the tablet is for it to be similar to the iPhone.