We know many of you have been eagerly awaiting news about our products being available on tablets. You’ll be happy to hear that our plans have solidified enough at this point that we're ready to share them. So, without any further ado, we're thrilled to announce that our first tablet products will be appearing on the iPad!

We're taking an incremental approach with our overall tablet implementation. We're starting with one product initially, which will be Hero Lab. Once that's complete, we'll focus on Army Builder for the iPad, mirroring what we did in developing our native Mac versions. By breaking the development effort into these types of chunks, we'll get more content onto your tablets faster.

In the interest of getting Hero Lab for the iPad ready as quickly as possible, we'll also be splitting that development effort into phases. The first tablet release will turn your iPad into an in-play character sheet specifically for Pathfinder. The tablet version will be fully interoperable with your PC or Mac version of Hero Lab, so you'll be able to create a character on your desktop or laptop, move it to the iPad for use during your game, and then move it back to your computer for leveling up.

Once we've released the in-play character sheet capability, we'll turn our attention to additional functionality. The first thing we'll be adding is full character creation capabilities. After that, we'll begin adding GM-related functionality, like the Tactical Console. As soon as complete product functionality is in place, we'll start incorporating other game systems into the tablet application as well. We'll provide updates on the timing of these features as well as on the introduction of Army Builder for the iPad over the course of the year as our development progresses.

We aren’t yet prepared to announce an official launch date for Hero Lab on the iPad, but our current estimates show that we’ll have it in time for the holidays. In fact, we’ve been hard at work for a few months now, and we'll have an early prototype available for you to peruse at Gen Con in a few weeks. We’re also still working through some of the details regarding licensing and pricing. As all those various pieces fall into place over the next few months, we’ll keep you up to date through future editions of the newsletter.

We know this decision is disappointing for those of you that have adopted other tablet platforms already, and we wish we could have found a way to effectively develop a cross-platform solution so everyone would be happy. However, after doing a great deal of research and evaluation of the various options, we concluded that the available cross-platform tools were simply not going to yield a “battery-friendly” application that offered all the power and flexibility you've come to expect from our products. Given the major differences between the various platforms and the fact that we simply don’t have the resources to simultaneously develop across multiple platforms, we were forced to choose one platform to initially support. Our analysis led us to the iPad as the best platform to target first.

There's an important detail to remember for anyone who prefers an alternate tablet platform from the iPad. Once we have an iPad implementation in place, we'll absolutely be expanding onto other platforms, and we expect to be able to leverage a great deal of the work we’re doing now when we begin work on other tablet platforms. We’ll keep you abreast of our plans related to that as they take shape.

If you’re going to be at Gen Con, we encourage you to stop by booth #1827 to check out the initial prototype of Hero Lab on the iPad!

Ratius wrote:Interestingly they dont seem to rule out other Tablet platforms completely, just that the Ipad will be first?
Did I read that correctly?