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How not ready the world is for Retina

X

xfs

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 20, 2011
67
0
Just got my MBP-R base model, and got a welcome email from Apple. Most websites are not retina, I will post my impressions later. But just a quick screenshot that shows how not ready the world is for Retina right now. It is an email from Apple and they probably know I will probably be reading it on my new computer.

The fonts and reading experience are just stellar. I kinda feel really sad for my old computer which is sitting right next to my Retina right now, I downloaded Spotify and just played a song, and the song that played was "Pale Horse" by Smashing Pumpkins. I have never felt this emotional about upgrading :) My old machine has been a great great machine.

More later.
 

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AFAIK, websites are not related to retina. Websites are a kind of special file servers (web servers) that serve HTML pages, images, stylesheets, scripts,... which are rendered by your preferred browser. Are you using Safari or another browser? If I am not wrong, Safari is retina aware.
 
Websites with text only are good, Instapaper etc. Websites that have images even macrumors.com's text editor, seriously pixelated.
 
The scary thing is how I don't think the Internet is ever going to be ready. Unless I'm underestimating how feasible it is to code websites so it can swap between high-resolution and standard (72dpi) images based on display type.
 
why would non-text render as pixelated? I understand it's scaled up, but it's scaled up with more pixels to work with to offset it, no?
 
I am not a web developer, but I think it should be easy to implement with a small snippet in the header which shoes you high-res if you are using a Retina display.

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Lvivske said:
why would non-text render as pixelated? I understand it's scaled up, but it's scaled up with more pixels to work with to offset it, no?
Click to expand...

Everywhere there is a GIF/PNG/JPEG, expect pixelation. So far no pixelation on pictures on Facebook probably because a lot of people these days are uploading high-res images.
 
Lvivske said:
why would non-text render as pixelated? I understand it's scaled up, but it's scaled up with more pixels to work with to offset it, no?
Click to expand...

I still believe it is related to the quality of images. If the image looks pixelated in a non-retina, it would still look pixelated in retina.

@xfs: What are the websites' URLs? I am interested to check them out with my old macbook pro and then with a retina at my local Apple store.
 
sofianito said:
I still believe it is related to the quality of images. If the image looks pixelated in a non-retina, it would still look pixelated in retina.

@xfs: What are the websites' URLs? I am interested to check them out with my old macbook pro and then with a retina at my local Apple store.
Click to expand...

Everything.
If I go to Tumblr, the header where it says TUMBLR is pixelated.
If I go to CNN.com, the header again for CNN is pixelated, right on top.
Going to Youtube, the youtube logo on the main page is pixelated.

Now these are pretty big websites.

I go to Apple.com, while it is loading the main page, it is pixelated, but then it recovers and gets crisp. I wish that it stays like that, I click on the Store tab, and BAMMM, all images of products are pixelated :(

I hope I am doing something wrong.
 
It's surprisingly easy to start upgrading your websites to be Retina-aware. It took me only a few minutes to recode a gallery to serve up double-sized images (200x150 instead of 100x75) as thumbnails, automatically create both thumbnails whenever they are created (or if either is missing), and thus the gallery is now beautiful on ipad3 and MBPr, but no slower on standard computers. It took a little longer to learn CSS3 gradient fiddling and change the buttons and menus to use those instead of PNG images, but not too long. Serving a high-resolution home page logo is no problem at all, of course. Then the final thing is to re-master the major images throughout the site. This will take a long time, of course, but is only photography and image manipulation. All img tags in my sites are served from PHP functions and specifically sized from the image file anyway, so it's not a big change to look for a double-resolution picture in a separate directory and serve that if it's required and available. Thus I can slowly upgrade the thousands of photos on the site as I get round to it.

The only things left are tiny buttons and other GIF stuff, which can be done here and there as little mini-projects when I'm bored and watching TV with the MBPr on my lap...

It's not a big deal, and I'm sure that a lot of sites will be doing this over the next year or so. Sites will need to be ready for the majority of computers going retina over the next few years.
 
Apple is sort of asking a lot of the entire world (wide web) to re-do all their web pages for a relatively small number of notebook users. At least with the iPad Retina there were only apps to update, and those were developers who were in the market specifically for Apple customers. The internet, however, is a different story. Will web sites even bother upgrading all their assets for Retina viewers? And for that matter, is it even necessary? Do ordinary web pages look bad in Retina?
 
tillsbury said:
It's not a big deal, and I'm sure that a lot of sites will be doing this over the next year or so. Sites will need to be ready for the majority of computers going retina over the next few years.
Click to expand...

Do you mean that Retina will become a standard? :)

The issues I see are:
* Too much work for website designers
* increasing the resolution of images will increase the internet bandwidth usage
 
bitfidelity said:
The scary thing is how I don't think the Internet is ever going to be ready...
Click to expand...

I know there are many here that will spit out their Kool-Aid in horror when they read this but:

Isn't the bigger question what incentive is there to spend money to make your site look 'great' on the MBPR? Seriously, whether you outsource your website or do it in-house, why would you spend the money for a fraction of a percent that will see it?

Until more OEMs have IPS screens, I do not think you are going to see a huge amount of sites make the necessary changes.

Posting howling responses and down voting my post won't change the facts either.

-P
 
Lvivske said:
why would non-text render as pixelated? I understand it's scaled up, but it's scaled up with more pixels to work with to offset it, no?
Click to expand...
Apple uses probably a low-quality algorithm, like the nearest-neighbor interpolation algorithm or the bilinear filtering algorithm, instead of bicubic-spline.

If you use VLC, you can choose the image scaling algorithm in the preferences. I use bicubic-spline for the upscaling and lanczos for the downscaling.
 
The biggest problem for web designers/developers is speed. Everyone strives to have the fastest possible load times. Google even has a guide on how to speed your load times. They even use load times as one of the metrics when deciding page rank.

The problem with bigger images is longer load times. All good designers optimize images specifically for the web so that the file size is as small as possible. Images like buttons and menus aren't the problem but photos can be a problem and if a site has many photos it's that much more of a problem. I don't see publishers scrambling to edit their pages just for rMBP users.
 
Pentad said:
I know there are many here that will spit out their
Until more OEMs have IPS screens, I do not think you are going to see a huge amount of sites make the necessary changes.
-P
Click to expand...

According to Wikipedia, IPS has been developed by Hitachi and is around since 1996. The IPS technology gives a larger view angle to the IPS displays. The rMBP display uses IPS technology but also uses LG Display technology (called Retina by Apple) in order to have high pixel density. This means that OEMs must agree to use mainly Retina (LG Display) in order to have high pixel density per inch... It also means that LG Display technology must become a kinda of "standard" in order to see efforts move forward...
 
sofianito said:
According to Wikipedia, IPS has been developed by Hitachi and is around since 1996. The IPS technology gives a larger view angle to the IPS displays. The rMBP display uses IPS technology but also uses LG Display technology (called Retina by Apple) in order to have high pixel density. This means that OEMs must agree to use mainly Retina (LG Display) in order to have high pixel density per inch... It also means that LG Display technology must become a kinda of "standard" in order to see efforts move forward...
Click to expand...

You are absolutely correct. I never said -nor meant to imply- that IPS technology is new.

However, the pixel density issue that the MBPr people are facing is still a tiny fraction of a percent of the total amount of Internet users.

I do agree with you that a 'standard' will have to be reached before you will see sites actively design for the Retina display.

-P
 
The pixelation doesn't really bother me. It's hardly noticeable at a normal viewing distance. I truly think Apple will release an update that somehow addresses this problem.
 
xfs said:
I am not a web developer, but I think it should be easy to implement with a small snippet in the header which shoes you high-res if you are using a Retina display.
Click to expand...


One of the problems here would be that "retina" isn't a standard in terms of resolution. Apple may need to adjust the way the OS scales things. I wouldn't expect all of the web developers to address such an issue immediately given that such displays remain a minority.
 
PhaserFuzz said:
The pixelation doesn't really bother me. It's hardly noticeable at a normal viewing distance. I truly think Apple will release an update that somehow addresses this problem.
Click to expand...

It's not apple's fault nor can they fix it. You can't take 1 megapixel page and magically make 5 mp of information out of it. The web designers and app designers will have to do it.
 
"Retina" isn't just about Apple. It's about having displays where the pixel isn't the smallest unit of measure. This doesn't just apply to MBPr, it also applies to the ipad 3 (for internet use as well as apps), and to a small number of other mobile devices (smartphones). There are a number using scaling of 1.5, and there are the ipad3 and MBPr using scaling of 2. Other devices in the future will use a number greater than 1. Obviously 2 is the major number likely to be used for the medium term, until we have ultra-high resolution displays where even higher numbers might be worthwhile.

Remember that Windows 8 is coming out very soon, which has support for HiDPI (i.e. Retina-like more-than-one-pixel-per-pixel). That will be the start of the big change.

If you don't think the whole computer world will move eventually to Retina displays (at least at the medium to high end), just look at how the MB Air influenced new Windows portables.

Yes, it's early, but this is all going to happen...
 
xfs said:
Everything.
If I go to Tumblr, the header where it says TUMBLR is pixelated.
If I go to CNN.com, the header again for CNN is pixelated, right on top.
Going to Youtube, the youtube logo on the main page is pixelated.

Now these are pretty big websites.

I go to Apple.com, while it is loading the main page, it is pixelated, but then it recovers and gets crisp. I wish that it stays like that, I click on the Store tab, and BAMMM, all images of products are pixelated :(

I hope I am doing something wrong.
Click to expand...

I guess I just don't get it. My iPad has a retina display and websites look great with it. Why can't! Or doesn't, the MBP do the same thing?
 
Aodhan said:
Apple is sort of asking a lot of the entire world (wide web) to re-do all their web pages for a relatively small number of notebook users.
Click to expand...

That's the point. Most aren't putting any effort because they know only the 0.1% of their visitors are on retina macbooks, in my opinion.
 
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