It's one of those days again: Apple held a product announcement today, announcing several new products. The most important of which was rumoured about for a long time now: a smaller iPad. It's called the iPad mini, and has the potential to become the best-selling iPad - and thus, the best selling tablet.
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Member since:2005-11-29
Resolution independence is a solved problem. Where issues start to arise are on displays with different aspect ratios. The app will scale, but things will look different.
Windows 8 solves this by having a developer choose between letter boxing and showing more content.
Works well for apps (which likely will want to show more content) and games (which sometimes will prefer to letterbox).
Member since:2009-09-04
Unless you are talking about the technique of pixel doubling a display (or another multiplier that results in integers, not floats) I strongly disagree. When I resize vectors (typically in Photoshop) to a by a non-even multiplier such as 1.33 (used by Nexus 7) i often have to re-arrange and redraw a lot of my graphics. With 2X (Retina Apple stuff, some Android devices) I just resize and all of it looks sharp (I might still do some adjustment, but I need to do way less than with non-even numbers.)
Even if you export everything to vectors you still have to think about where on the pixel grid those vectors actually fall (this will affect how sharp things look).
Bjango have a excellent blog post on this subject if you want to know more: http://bjango.com/articles/everythingisagrid/
Member since:2006-06-01
Member since:2010-10-05
Yes, it's not because iOS cannot handle different resolutions at the low level (e.g. display drivers). It's because its UI toolkit does not come with a proper layout manager as standard. This makes many applications hard-code layouts for specific resolutions, making change of the resolution on new devices a pain. So it doesn't matter much that iOS could run with a different resolution. It's still not going to happen: otherwise all apps will look ugly at launch.
Android apps handle different resolutions fairly well. Of course, there's no magic that will automatically optimize your layout for different screen sizes, but similar sizes with different resolutions work fine.
iPad mini will have the size problem too -- even though the resolution matches previous 10" iPad many apps might want to use a different layout on the smaller 7" screen.
Member since:2008-07-04
UIKit does actually come with a proper layout manager, it had it from day one,
As many other things in cocoa touch it was inherited from mac UI frameworks (years back I believe from NEXT), If a developer use standard UIKit widgets (and many does) he can define layout attributes very easily from the interface builder, no need to write single line of code.
using standard view controllers doesn't even requires to define anything.
for standard UI apps all a developer has to do to support the iphone5 resolution for example may very well be just updating the splash screen image.
The reason it doesn't happen automatically is because apple wants to force developers to test the apps on the new resolutions.
The reason apple got to this unfortunate state in the first place comes from the fact that unlike android, all the iOS devices that were running iOS at the time apple opened it for third party development had the same screen and same resolution, Lots of developers were lazy and just statically positioned elements, it worked perfectly on every iOS device back then.
The situation is very different from android where from the very beginning it was obvious that android devices will come at different shapes, sizes and resolutions.
On the other hand though, the fact that developers has to test and create updated build to support new resolutions is also one of the main reasons that encourage app developers to create a proper suitable layout for the iPad form factor.
As you say, Android apps handle different resolutions fairly well, so it's good enough reason for lots of developers to leave it as it is.
Member since:2005-07-06
iOS and Mac recently gained a new API for auto-layout called ... Auto Layout:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserExperienc...
This should go a decent way towards assisting developers create flexible UIs. Admittedly it's a few years too late and IMHO still not as intuitive as most XML(/other UI-domain specific language)-based frameworks, but it's the best thing Apple's come up with yet.
Edited 2012-10-24 14:03 UTC
Member since:2006-06-01
You are exactly right, but it was an opportunity for Thom to get in a dig at Apple in the article, pure and simple. The same thing applies to Android and the dozens of screen resolutions of all the various phones and tablets that exist. That's great for choice, but horrible for developers, who have to try and support all those resolutions. Sadly it doesn't happen, and some apps work on some phones and tablets and others don't. Combine that with the fact that most of the Android devices out there are running an OS that is 4-5 versions back from the latest one, and you have a true mess. Apple is avoiding this mess by making the iPad mini's screen resolution a complete non-issue for developers. Existing apps all WORK.
Member since:2005-06-29
It's still a trade-off. Apple's choices have made it more difficult to let iOS and its applications support multiple resolutions - but they did so to make it easier on developer. However, the downside is that resolution has become a constraining factor in designing iOS hardware.
Android made a different choice, with different tradeoffs. Pointing that out is not a dig at Apple - it's a simple and cold fact.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2006-01-01
I don't think the issue is that the OS does not support multiple resolutions. It supports them fine.
The main issue is that, traditionally, most developers hard code positions and sizes into their apps making it difficult for apps to adapt to different resolutions automatically.
Both Microsoft and Google strive for resolution independence but as you can see from the apps themselves that process is just not very successful. This is mainly because it's easy to just let some fields stretch but it much more difficult to reorganize a UI dynamically for a larger screen.
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