Path’s new iPad app gets bigger, prettier, and easier

Path, a social network focused on private updates for small friend groups, has just rolled out its brand-spankin’-new app for iPad, and it’s a doozy.

The startup emphasized in an announcement this morning that the app isn’t just Path for iPhone on a bigger canvas; rather, the design nerds at Path rebuilt the whole shebang from the ground up.

“As you’ve come to expect from Path, Path for iPad is beautifully and purposely designed,” said a Path rep via email. “The larger iPad screen allows for different viewing options in both portrait and landscape modes.”

One of the more interesting visual changes is the collage interface for landscape mode viewing. Each daily collage is different, and you can swipe back and forth to see a previous day’s collage.

Within each collage, more important moments are highlighted in larger tiles. Tapping a tile will take you to a fullscreen view to look at all the comments and emotions associated with the content.

Checkins and arrivals are also displayed in a single map, and the homescreen now displays recent activity and your friends list in addition to your home feed.

Here’s a sneak peek:

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We recently got to sit down with Path CEO Dave Morin for a long chat on mobile design. The founder and former Facebooker, who is famously passionate about design, told us, “True simplicity takes a lot of time. And in mobile that’s especially true.”

Hence the long wait for Path’s big iPad debut, we can deduce.

The company previously spent an entire year taking its app from the 1.0 version to the 2.0 version, and during that year, the team found that most of its users were only using one screen. Getting down to a bare-bones, simple, elegant interface based on that data took time and lots of careful UI/UX work. What was left at the end, said Morin, was a single-screen design users loved.

Top image courtesy of Natasha Kramskaya, Shutterstock