I suggest anyone who replied below reads all of these as well as the final note at the bottom, I'm not going to write the same thing to all of you.
Well, you can get around this to a point if you base your system of vector as opposed to bitmapped graphics, then you are free to pick any screen res you like.
Of course, you do need a reasonably high screen res to make a vector graphics based system look nice when things get on the small size on screen.
I know some of Windows and Mac icons now are vector based rather than bitmapped. I'm not sure how much though.
And I don't know if any of the graphics systems in the iPad are vector based.
Perhaps there is a dev who would be kind enough to shed some light on this point?
No, you can't. The graphics don't matter, I'm talking about the sizing of controls. Read below.
Hearing you guys talk, it's a wonder PC gaming ever took off or that we can use Macs at all.
Screen resolutions have never been an absolute. Developers since the early days of bitmap displays have had to contend with the fact that the screen on which their app was displayed was not garanteed to have a specific resolution.
Visual Basic programming, of all things simple and easy to pick up by newbies, had facilities and very detailed examples in its documentation on how to properly make apps resize and keep their controls properly sized/positionned, no matter the scaling factor (be it 1.135789734973 or 1.745874587 or 0.75).
Yet all of you are in, in 2010, telling us how hard this going to be on iOS ? Let's face it, it is as hard as many of you layman claim, then it's because Apple failed at designing iOS, not because the concept is inherently hard at all.
For starters, there's no need to be rude. You're missing one important point in your logic, when an iPhone app upscales it isn't keeping the controls the same size and just repositioning them like you said with a VB app, it's increasing the size of each control as well and keeping it in the same position it was originally.
When you have a button which is 101x31 pixels, and you scale it up by 50% you get 151.5 pixels and 46.5 pixels, a control can't be drawn at that, it has to rounded up or down and either way it'll not look right -- if it was a multiple, 2, 3, 4, etc., this would NEVER happen. And, games (like images and videos) aren't comparable to apps either.
There's a reason when you're designing an app for Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, that you can't set a control to have half a pixel in its size, I.E, 101.5 pixels wide, so why won't they let you do that, but they'll let that happen when they scale it? They won't.
As I said before, scaling can't happen unless it's 2x, 3x, etc. (not talking about images, or videos)
And, I'm certainly not a layman, whilst I may not be an expert I still know plenty.
I don't think that "half pixels" are a problem - try it yourself: take a screenshot of some text at 1024x768 and size it up to, say, 1280x960 in Photoshop - even with a simple bilinear filter (it's safe to assume that when running an app designed for the then-old iPad, there will be more than enough power left for a simple bilinear filter) you get a perfectly usable resized version; sure, it's not as pretty or crisp as the original, but that would just as well hold for an integer resize.
Especially coming from a 1024x768 resolution, controls are going to be more than just a few pixels wide, so it hardly matters if you're sizing something from 30 pixels to 60 pixels (at double size) or just to 45 pixels.
Like I said, images or videos don't matter -- they're different, they stretch, they don't have individual controls being drawn inside of them. Read above.
This argument makes n sense to me, whatsoever. If you're arguing that the iPad would have trouble scaling the image of the controls, while it wouldn't have trouble with full frame video, that seems absurd to me. If your arguing that it would have trouble interpreting where on the touch screen the edge of the control is because it's scaled, you are aware that a single pixel right now is about .007" and the required size of a touch for iOS to respond is significantly larger, right? So, unless you're meaning something else entirely, I just don't see your argument at all.
I'm arguing neither of what you said. Read above.
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Summary
If you increase the resolution of the iPad by 1.5x to 1536x1152 and you've got an iPad app which has a button which is 101x30 pixels, it'll be scaled up to 151.5x45 pixels, and as you can see that just won't work.
An app isn't the same as a video, or an image, which have no controls drawn inside of them that are a certain size and have a certain location, so when you scale it, it works fine.
Do you all get it now? It has nothing to do with images or video or even games.
