Apple unveils iPad mini
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 23rd Oct 2012 19:12 UTC
Apple 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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RE: resolution variability
by Nelson on Tue 23rd Oct 2012 20:22 UTC in reply to "resolution variability"
Nelson
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).

Reply Parent Score: 5

Torbjorn Vik Lunde 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/

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[3]: resolution variability
by Nelson on Thu 25th Oct 2012 07:17 in reply to "RE[2]: resolution variability"
Nelson Member since:
2005-11-29

The XAML stack handles all of this easily.

By default the layout is adaptive, though you can opt-in to a fixed layout with a styled letterbox (Often even showing relevant content).

The only place where scaling by non whole multipliers is a problem is when using bitmapped content, which is why Microsoft has guidelines to where possible provide images at specific scales.

Even then, you can control the quality of the scaling of Bitmaps in the event that you don't control the scales that they're presented at (Remote images or something).

On top of that, you can tell the Layout engine to round its measurements and not put you on a sub-pixel boundary (Which causes fuzziness even with vector drawing) using UseLayoutRounding.

There's very simple rules developers should follow on Windows 8 and they'll be fine scaling to higher resolutions and differing aspect ratios.

Reply Parent Score: 2

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RE[2]: resolution variability
by wocowboy on Wed 24th Oct 2012 09:56 in reply to "RE: resolution variability"
wocowboy Member since:
2006-06-01

That's fine, and I hope people gripe on here as much about the resultant black bars from letterboxing with Windows 8 as they did about the black bars on the iPhone 5's bigger screen, but somehow I doubt that will happen.

Reply Parent Score: -1

RE[3]: resolution variability
by Nelson on Thu 25th Oct 2012 06:58 in reply to "RE[2]: resolution variability"
Nelson Member since:
2005-11-29

Well genius, that's because letterboxing in Windows 8 is fully customizable and not just black.

Of course, you've done Windows 8 development so you know this, and your opinion is completely relevant.

Oh wait you haven't and it's not.

Reply Parent Score: 2