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iPhone 5 Cases Suggest a Much Larger Device with a 4" Screen
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The iphone 4 may not be uncomfortable to hold, but its definitely not cozy in the hand like the 3gs. Its the same with the ipad2. Its lighter and thinner but not as comfortable to hold as the first ipad. If, and thats a BIG if, Apple wants go for a bigger screen, a curved back that contours to the palm and fingers is the way to go. Its a matter of taste, but I think the original look is the best look. and the path that the design is going is kinda lacking Apple's uniqueness (when the iphone 4 came out, I thought it looked like something Sony would design because of the lack of curves and the black with silver trim, which was Sony's favorite color scheme.)
I believe iphone 3gs will finally retire and of course iphone 4 will take its place on the low end. There will be 2 new phones with the first being a slightly different iphone 4 (4s) with better specs but no overall design change and finally an all new designed iphone (5) which will appeal to those who care (me) slimmed down, bigger screen and bumped up specs.
Apple will then have 3 solid options (not including any storage choices) to offer the public which will ultimately rely on the new iOS 5. The operating system has always been the bread and butter and will make the whole thing "magical" once again.
If Apple misses the boat on this one after making most people wait then they have truly let things slip to the waste side. I do love rumors though.
Apple will then have 3 solid options (not including any storage choices) to offer the public which will ultimately rely on the new iOS 5. The operating system has always been the bread and butter and will make the whole thing "magical" once again.
If Apple misses the boat on this one after making most people wait then they have truly let things slip to the waste side. I do love rumors though.
Sure, but how ugly would that look like? Developers have no information yet that they must create a new version for a phone with more pixels (except maybe a handfull of high-profile ones who can be trusted to keep mum). It will take months for even just the most used 10% of all apps to be converted. Do you really think Apple will want people to walk around with new iPhones where almost all of their apps run with a black border?
The iPad launched with 2000 native apps and that was after three months of developer lead time. Right now it looks like there might be a two week lead time between iPhone 5 announcement and ship date. How many apps will be converted (and approved) in that two weeks?
And iOS never had provisions to just add more 'whitespace' when the display size increases (like Android had, taken to an extreme by running 2.2 on a 7" display). Without adding that to iOS, Apple will not add a slightly different size.
I don't want to say that there is no case for a larger iPhone, I just don't understand why Apple would introduce it without giving developers some lead time to adjust for it. Yes, they could have some secret code in iOS 5 that automatically adds whitespace (and makes incremental content like lists, images, maps just display more) but a lot of apps would look somewhat bloated with that approach and a lot of developers would prefer to adjust their apps to the new physical size.
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I just hope the new iPhone 5 does not get too big... I love the feel of the 4. Fits in the pocket nice, etc... I guess I won't know until I can pick it up and hold it. Too big is one of the things I don't like about some of the HTC, Moto and Samsung phones. Some just don't feel good in the hand and look bulky.
True story. Maybe they'll switch to pure over the air syncing and updates? Or loading with the sound cable, like the iPod Shuffle does?
if this new phone gets thinner at one end i'll be gutted. :-(
Surely Apple wouldn't make such a design error.....surely!
Surely Apple wouldn't make such a design error.....surely!
Sure, that is the easiest (some would call it the laziest) option. But as a developer, your touch targets just increased in physical size, do you adjust that again, to do add another button in a row of buttons because if a 2x2 mm touch target was large enough on the existing iPhones, you can add another one of those.
Yes, keeping a consistent message ('speaking with one voice') is part of Apple's overall concept.
Hum... have you ever developped software for Cocoa Touch ? You don't calculate "touch targets" with physical dimensions.
Moot point. Your touch targets are pixel based objects. Users just now have bigger surfaces to touch that will send a touch event to your view.
It is ? Since when ? "People don't read books" iBook. "People don't want to watch video on an iPod screen", iPod video.
Keeping a consistent message is as far of Apple's overall concept as you can get.
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Because if you hold it horizontally it would not be right. Apple would have to have a massive reason to make it this way.
Technically yes, but in practice the physical and pixel dimensions have been 100% locked, every iOS developer knows exactly what the physical dimensions of his touch targets are. And in the end the dimensions of a finger are defined in millimeter not pixels, developers design with fingers in mind but enter the values in pixels but so far the question whether to enter a value in millimeters or pixels was a moot one as they two were locked like a fixed exchange rate.
As I said, of course this works but developers still have to ask themselves whether they want to develop a new version of their app that has smaller touch targets in pixels (but the same in millimeters) as this might allow them to fit an extra control on the screen.
Well, maybe by your standards but in comparison with almost all other companies they are by far the most consistent one. Let's just look at all the messages HP has been sending out on WebOS over the last year, there have at a dozen of people at HP making statements on it, and the public message has kept changing back and forth (remember the CEO, Mark Hurd, interview where he said, they did not buy Palm to be in the smartphone business only for a press release a few days later saying that he actually did not mean what he was saying).
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No... No... seriously. Go write code for Cocoa Touch. There's 2 things you know when you receive a touch :
http://developer.apple.com/library/...erence/UITouch_Class/Reference/Reference.html
The view that got touched, and a CGPoint reference to where that view was touched.
There is no targets in millimeters here. That's all just in your head, one big non-issue that doesn't exist at all. You're making it up on the spot. If the objects are bigger, my finger has more surface to touch them, that's all. The developer doesn't know or care or want to make the surface smaller.
The coordinate system based on CGPoints is static, it doesn't rely on physical dimensions at all. Even if a developer wanted to make smaller "bounding" boxes, there is no information in the OS to do so. And with the same number of pixels, your objects all showing up larger, why would you even want to start messing with smaller bounding boxes for something already as innacurate as touching ? (Ever had to zoom into mobile safari just to precisely touch a small link ? I do all the time).
This more than anything other conversations we've had about software development tells you have no experience with the iOS SDK.
No, they don't. They can't fit extra anything on the screen aside from making them take less pixels, which would be a huge pain.
A 4" and 3.5" screen won't change a thing for developers if both have the same resolution. It changes nothing at all.
Apple is as inconsistent with their message as any other corporation. Steve Jobs lies through his teeth and changes his message to fit whatever it is they are doing at the time, and he does so on a regular basis.
Heck, even your example is poorly chosen, since by Mark Hurd's statement and Leo's move with the platform currently, it seems their message was consistent : We don't care about webOS hardware. Palm made that, we're going to release it anyway, but we don't care about it, we want webOS the platform.
And that's what they've been doing. They dropped the hardware and committed themselves to the software. Seems Mark Hurd pretty much gave you a strong hint of what was coming and formed a consistent message there.
No seriously, don't pretend stuff like that. Apple isn't consistent, Oracle isn't consistent, Google isn't consistent, HP isn't consistent, none of them are.
That I find unbelievable. Do you mean if I want to make a 'button' that stretches the whole width of the screen, it would have same 'bounding box' as a button that stretches only half of the screen width?
Well, if you design both for iPhone 4 and 3GS, you already have to create the same button with a different set of pixels (and yet another set of pixels for any iPad version).
A lot of apps have a row of buttons at the bottom (that might be a built-in iOS control but nothing stops a developer from creating their own buttons). If you make the screen physically wider, you can possibly fit another button in there. Of course this is work but it equally was work to update your graphics for the iPhone 4 resolution and yet a lot of developers did it.
Sure, in a nice simple binary, black and white world there is consistent and inconsistent. And since Apple is not fully consistent is just as bad as everybody else in this simple binary world view.
But try to count how many individuals at Apple give interviews and how many at HP do? How many Apple employees blog about their company and how many HP employees do?
No, I'm not. But in a scenario where the resolution is the same, this is a non-issue. Your buttons are based on pixel values, not screen dimension. Your bounding box is related to pixels, not millimeters on the screen.
Obviously, again, your grasp on the concept is frail.
You don't. Really. Interface Builder provides scaling automatically. You just define a button to fit inside a view, no matter what the view's size is in pixels. This is the same functionality in OS X and iOS. View sizes and objects sizes can be defined as percentages of one another.
I had exactly 0 code and parameters to change with the "retina" display for my app to just work. The view is now reporting a 960x640 size on the iPhone 4 simulator, but all the code just works and the UI is all properly positionned.
Not if you have the same number of pixels. Unless you start making your buttons smaller, thus less detailed than they were.
Seriously, go play around with the SDK and write an app. Learn about how it works before you talk about it. I'm quite tired of you trying to tell me about developer issues that exist only based on your ignorance of what developers do.
3.5" screen or 4" screen, if both are 960x640, there is absolutely nothing to change UI wise or Input wise for developers. It just works. Developers don't make different UIs for the MBA's 13" 1440x900 screen and the MBP's 15" 1440x900 screen...
Frankly, there's a lot more Apple news and stuff out there than HP news and stuff.
And I don't get why you feel Apple being "consistent" is a positive. Being consistent in this industry is a mark of failure. Companies need to adapt and if that means changing their tune every once in a while, they will. There's nothing negative in the inconsistency, hence why they all do it.
Is it just me that can't stand inches and imperial measurements.
Why on earth do we measure things in some weird screwed up Base 12?
Why on earth do we measure things in some weird screwed up Base 12?
For the people that don't want a 4 inch phone.
What are you going to do? Stay with the iphone 4 or god forbid the 3gs forever? I believe the majority of people (including myself) want a larger screen. This is you main interactive area and 4 inches is a good size. A huge difference from 3.5 and not too big like a 4.3 incher. Clearly Apple is losing the battle against larger screen Android devices.
It will be a huge mistake if they don't go 4 inches. I see this bringing more Android users over rather than more iphone users deflecting to Android. What are your choices if you deflect to Android? All android devices under 4 inches are considered mid range. And windows mobile = garbage compared to android.
Just don't see a grey area here. Either 3.5 or 4.0 because 3.7 to 3.8 is a waste of time. I know because I upgraded from a Droid 3.7 incher to a 4.3 droid x and the difference is huge. I don't want to go below 4.0 inches regardless of OS. Apple must have a 4.0 (or above) for me to jump from Android. LTE would be a bonus too. This stubbornness will be the death of Apple. You people that still want 3.5 inches don't know what your talking about and what your missing because you've been stuck with that screen size since 2007.
What are you going to do? Stay with the iphone 4 or god forbid the 3gs forever? I believe the majority of people (including myself) want a larger screen. This is you main interactive area and 4 inches is a good size. A huge difference from 3.5 and not too big like a 4.3 incher. Clearly Apple is losing the battle against larger screen Android devices.
It will be a huge mistake if they don't go 4 inches. I see this bringing more Android users over rather than more iphone users deflecting to Android. What are your choices if you deflect to Android? All android devices under 4 inches are considered mid range. And windows mobile = garbage compared to android.
Just don't see a grey area here. Either 3.5 or 4.0 because 3.7 to 3.8 is a waste of time. I know because I upgraded from a Droid 3.7 incher to a 4.3 droid x and the difference is huge. I don't want to go below 4.0 inches regardless of OS. Apple must have a 4.0 (or above) for me to jump from Android. LTE would be a bonus too. This stubbornness will be the death of Apple. You people that still want 3.5 inches don't know what your talking about and what your missing because you've been stuck with that screen size since 2007.
I'm not a developer, not even one of the parties in this exchange. However, isn't the original poster on this correct? Namely, that if a developer would like to add an extra button due to the larger screen size, they could?
Your point is that they won't have to, but his is that one could!
I see many apps that have only 4 or 5 buttons at the bottom, others with 6 or 7.
One other thing... iPhone apps at 2x on the iPad often look horrendous (well the text especially), so this stuff can't be resolution independent with good scaling that is aesthetically pleasing! I would imagine that a change in screen size, even if the iOS scales the GUI for an app, could result in a mess-- things not quite right, icons out of proportion. Just imagine, e.g., if it became a 5" x 3" screen. I'm pretty sure that the ebook Stanza ereader or the astronomy app Starmap Pro wouldn't look at good!