Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 17th Dec 2011 00:17 UTC
Apple makes the best consumer laptops. For me, there's absolutely no denying that this is the case. Apple has had this lead over the competition since the iBook G3 Dual USB 12.1" and 14", and has never lost it. Right now, the rumour mill is abuzz about Apple supposedly prepping to launch a MacBook Pro with a retina display - 2880x1800.
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Member since:2010-06-01
Member since:2005-09-08
Yes there is. Otherwise printing web-pages wouldn't work. DPI is ignored in the standard zone of 75-150, and is only enforced for print DPI of 300+
Practically what happens is that CSS uses a fixed DPI of 96, but on high resolution devices, the pixels (px value) becomes multiple pixels.
In short:
On normal DPI a pixel is a pixel, but inches and centimeters varies.
On high DPI, an inch is an inch, and centimeter is a centimeter but pixels are often more than pixel.
Yes, the web is weird, but there are rules for handling the crazy.
Member since:2010-11-04
There are no DPI settings for the web, now are there? I have a 1600x900 display and I have to view all websites zoomed in 150% in firefox. I use an addon that makes that zoom level stick. For the most part websites look ok. Images, however, look blurred because they aren't designed for high resolutions.
Folks doing mobile application and web development targeting mobile devices will already be familiar with how this is being dealt with "correctly".
Many Android and Windows Phone devices have a 150% "scale factor" between logical or CSS pixels and the physical on-screen pixels. The iPhone 4 Retina display and some newer Android phones (eg Galaxy Nexus) have a 200% scale factor. This is roughly equivalent to zooming in 150% or 200% in a modern browser -- all the graphics are larger as well as the text, and indeed graphics that aren't designed for it may end up a little blurry because of the scaling.
Using scalable SVG graphics can resolve this but still isn't common (for one thing, Android's standard browser hasn't supported SVG on phones until the latest version 4.0!). CSS media queries can be used to check the logical DPI or scaling factor and switch in higher-resolution assets; you'll see this for instance on Google's mobile Gmail interface or Facebook's touch.facebook.com, where the icons come up at full resolution.
Currently, most desktop operating systems don't have an equivalent system-wide setting. Mac OS X has one (HiDPI mode in 10.7), but it's still "experimental" and you need to use debug tools to switch it on; only some software will show you things rendered at full resolution, while many other apps -- like old iPhone apps on an iPhone 4 -- will render at lower resolution and get zoomed up. If the rumors are true, presumably they'll make that enabled by default on the new laptops with super high-res screens, and -- like on iOS -- app developers will start adopting support for it at their own pace, while in the meantime many apps show pixelated but correctly sized.
Windows may now have an equivalent, though I haven't tested such things in ages -- traditionally you can change the logical DPI which bumps up font sizes and the sizes of things measured in "dialog units", but anything using fixed pixel sizes still ended up reaally tiny if you made the kind of large adjustment you'd need for 200+dpi screens.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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2009-05-23
There are no DPI settings for the web, now are there? I have a 1600x900 display and I have to view all websites zoomed in 150% in firefox. I use an addon that makes that zoom level stick. For the most part websites look ok. Images, however, look blurred because they aren't designed for high resolutions. So it's not just desktop applications that have to be updated. Websites do too. The problem is that lots of people are still at 1024x768 and so web developers face a tough choice.