iPad mini Developers - Is there any truth to the scaling claims (iPad Mini, battery life, etc)?

DJinTX said:

Hey Zhenya,

Could you explain this graphic for me? You obviously have a lot of technical knowledge, but I am having trouble understanding this part. I'm sure you're making a great point related to this discussion, and I just want to be able to follow along.

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I'm not Zhenya, but I'll attempt to explain.

The image shows what will happen if you display an iPad app on a screen with 1.5 times the resolution of the iPad.

If you stretch the app to fill the screen, then you get artifacts like shown in the image below.



The smallest image above is 1x, and the largest is 2x. Those two are the only ones that look perfect. All the inbetween sizes are distorted somehow.

Boxed or stretched, a 1.5x screen doesn't provide optimal experience for iPad apps.

Night Spring said:

I'm not Zhenya, but I'll attempt to explain.

The image shows what will happen if you display an iPad app on a screen with 1.5 times the resolution of the iPad.

If you stretch the app to fill the screen, then you get artifacts like shown in the image below.

Image

The smallest image above is 1x, and the largest is 2x. Those two are the only ones that look perfect. All the inbetween sizes are distorted somehow.

Boxed or stretched, a 1.5x screen doesn't provide optimal experience for iPad apps.

Click to expand...

So Zhenya was just illustrating this earlier point that the slightly larger size would be inbetween 1x and 2x, and therefore would not look perfect and suffer from artifacts? I just assumed it was something new that I wasn't quite understanding. Thanks for the clarification.

Yes, that image was just in response to people wondering why they can't just run existing iPad apps on an in-between screen without scaling. They could do it, but it's not just a couple of small black bars like on the iPhone 5 - it'd be a huge border around the entire thing.

Edit: The other thing that's not readily apparent from that image is this. The white box is the entirety of the 7.9" Mini's screen. People are already complaining about the size of text and interface elements on the smaller screen. In order to run existing apps natively on a higher resolution screen as the example illustrates, everything would be 50% smaller than it is currently on the Mini's screen. The only way to keep the text and elements the same size is to scale them to use the entire screen, which brings up the issues with scaling. This is how Android deals with different resolution screens; elements are scaled up or scaled down as necessary. This works well for some things - pictures, movies, text, but not so well for fixed graphics. The very high resolution screens available today do soften the transitions somewhat, but the artifacts are still visible if you look for them.

zhenya said:

Yes, that image was just in response to people wondering why they can't just run existing iPad apps on an in-between screen without scaling. They could do it, but it's not just a couple of small black bars like on the iPhone 5 - it'd be a huge border around the entire thing.

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Ahh, this is what I was wanting to know. I didn't realize you were simulating the letterboxing that would occur. Makes perfect sense now. And yes, that would look ridiculous.

macbook123 said:

Thank you all. I appreciate the responses.

I will still say that I still don't have a sense of *how* difficult it would be to have intermediate resolution jumps, like on Android, and why this is in fact prohibitive enough to justify coming out with an iPad mini with crippled resolution, as opposed to something sensible that's between the resolution of the big iPad and that of this mini, say 1440x900.

I get that people are saying it is difficult, but difficult is a relative word, and I just haven't been convinced that it is difficult enough to stall progress in such a tragic way as has been done with the Mini (it being such a great product overall, with such an obvious flaw pointed out by every reviewer out there, and undoubtedly obvious also to people at Apple).

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May be the way to look at it is that when you introduce the in between resolution (between the 1024x768 and 2048x1536), everyone with tablet apps today has to review all their artwork and make sure that the artwork look appropriate for the resolution and size of the device. A button may be too small for user to hit, a window may look too big, the screen may not have enough space to show all the details you want.. And once you go over it, then you have to make the change and test them. Out the 275,000 tablet apps, some developers may decide to go through the effort while other don't and you will end up with a lot of complaint against the inconsistent experience. Just looks at Iphone 5 launch, initially there were a lot of complaints about seeing black bars for apps that don't support the new resolution. It is not an issue for future app development and new development tools won't help, it is an issue of legacy apps that is running today on either one of the resolution.

It is not really about difficulty in adding a resolution, it is more about the experience during the switch.

They could temporarily scale up apps, but then things would look crappy and developers wouldn't have a huge incentive to upgrade. They could just apply a border around apps (Like the iPhone 5 does on the top and bottom) but that would look and act pretty bad, text would likely be too small to read. I'm not sure what resolution would be retina for a Mini, but it would likely be a much larger jump than iPhone 4S->5 which would mean very large borders.

The main issue though is that 250,000 iPad ready apps will have to be updated to fit the new resolution. It would involve rescaling graphics and changing up layouts.

Google solves this issue by having multiple PPI dependent graphics sets plus having layouts that scale to display size. The OS picks the closest level and scales accordingly It has its benefits, but you don't get the pixel perfect precision that iOS apps have.