Why high resolution screens matter for Apple's iPad 2 - Page 4

wow, amazing how one little letter cleared that whole post up...

I was thinking, what the heck does "the plane of the home" mean? lol.

I don't imagine they'll have too much of an issue as long as they keep making it out of aluminum. I don't own one but based on how the iphone 4 almost never heats up, I'd guess it is not an issue in the ipad which has a much larger surface area.

I can not help wondering at the totally unfit crowd in the US that complains at the negilable weight of an iPad. I carry one everywhere and it doesn't bother me at all.

WIMPS

You may be interested in my new For Dummies Book, "How to Increase Your Strength to Hold a 24oz iPad in Just Forty Days"

Stop making fun of the people fixiated on Android as a viable solution to mobile devices.

It is bad enogh when I look at them and think "Why would you spend your money on any mobile OS given away by an advertsing company to lock you into their advertising?"

The software is free why would you have paid anyone for it and why would you pay any Internet provider at cellular rates good money to see these ads which consume vast amounts of data on your dime?

IMHO they have made clowns out of themselves by not thinking it through.

Below notice the leaders of Germany are not clowns.
They are using iPads to run the government.

I got the Kindle DX for that reason - I like the iPad screen size, decided I like not having the books lying around, but wanted a crisper screen. I'm very interested to see how a double-res iPad looks, and will definitely upgrade for that alone if it's finally comparable for reading. That said, the iPad already does everything else better than Kindle, it's really just for reading it wasn't quite there yet.

Mmmmm, Retina display.

And as an aside, the Atari ST DID have square pixels if you used the monochrome monitor - 640x400, higher res than the Mac at the same time, and you could run a full Mac emulator on it at a higher speed than a Mac at the time. Uh... so I hear, I mean, because I was a student at the time, and students have never done anything dubious like that.

Anyway, the GEM GUI wasn't too bad either until Microsoft killed it by making Digital Research have fixed windows instead of a real desktop on the PC side, which effectively killed it. There's some irony there - MS killing a windowing competitor that was nicer than Windows at the time, while they were stealing stuff from Apple. Fun times.

Ooops, missed you post. Exactly my point. It was a nice machine with an excellent monitor if you picked up the monochrome one. And programming the later models (Mega 2...) in assembly and using prodding the blitter chip into action was great fun too.

I actually moved from the Mega 2 to the NeXT slab, and tried doing assembly to directly manipulate the frame buffer. For whatever reason it wasn't overly successful... maybe because I didn't know the first thing about how to work with real multitasking, having other tasks updating UI elements at the same time and screwing with the frame buffer at the same time, etc. Live and learn.

I read all the time as well and have no issues with it due to the Rez.

I would much rather they start with a more sensative light sensor and some kind of light matte coating for the glass to reduce glare before hitting the rez issue

You've probably already buggered off under the impression that you were somehow 'right' on this one, but I'll bite anyway.

The point you are trying to make is that the iPads homescreen and launcher haven't changed at all between the iPhone and the iPad (which is true), and that this somehow equates to the iPad not having 'a distinct user interface that took advantage of its physically larger screen real estate', the quote from the article you tried to to disprove.

Maybe you're just being ignorant, or maybe you simply don't know about it, but iOS *does* have 'iPad-specific' UI elements that 'take advantage of the physically larger scren real estate'. There might be only two of them, but that's not the point, the popovers and split-view controls downright replaced the navigation and tab bar controllers used on the iPhone. You might think it's somehow required to 'drastically alter' the iOS UI frameworks to get a 'true' tablet UI that makes use of the screen real estate efficiently, but it's not. What matters is that the new UI elements make it dead-easy for developers to mix and match all the already existing UI elements inside split-view controllers and popovers, in ways that would not make any sense on a small iPhone screen. You said you were waiting for Android 3.0 because that would 'at least be developed from the ground up with tablets in mind', well: the fact that the iOS UI only required two relatively minor additions to make it absolutely perfect for tablets goes to show how iOS was already 'built from the ground up with tablet support in mind' before the iPad was even announced. You really think Apple first created iOS and the iPhone, only to find out by surprise they could also use it for a tablet? They've been planning the iPad, the iPhone and iOS for years, and people who work or used to work for Apple actually stated that initially, Apple wanted to release a tablet before they even released the iPhone, but that all the prototypes were just not good enough to meet their standards.

What matters is not how drastically you change your phone UI frameworks, but how well the changes and additions you make work for developers. The dearth of iPad specific applications that have a completely reworked UI compared to their iPhone counterparts show that. The SDK makes it so easy to decouple the UI from the rest of the app and bundle the iPhone and iPad versions in a single binary, that there really is no way any developer that takes his work seriously will settle for an upscaled iPad version, or one that simply adds some bigger fonts and more spacing to the iPhone layout and call it a day. Applications made that way will simply be ignored because there are nicer alternatives.

On the topic of the scalability of the Android UI: I think you're really missing the point here, which goes to show you don't really know what you're talking about, or you are just being dense on purpose. The only thing Android does to account for different screen resolutions, is re-layouting the same user interface automatically. That means adding more spacing and picking larger fonts. It doesn't automatically introduce split view controllers or popovers (Android 2.x doesn't even have those), it doesn't automatically scale up bitmap assets, and it doesn't automatically fill the extra space with useful UI bits. It also doesn't even scale up applications properly beyond the maximum supported resolution of 800x480 of applications made before Froyo, and worst of all: it doesn't provide any SDK support at all to create universal binaries that allow completely different user interfaces on different devices. The only thing it does is re-layouting applications the way a Windows program would do, but that's all. If that's your perception of a 'good tablet UI' that scales better than iOS, I'll take iOS any day of the week. Go find yourself some screenshots of (for example) the IMDB application on the iPad or the iPhone and see how different they are, they're really incomparable, and that is *only* because the iPad version can do so much more with the UI framework because of the simple fact it can use split view controllers and popovers.

Sometimes it's simplicity that makes genius and not complexity. Designing a UI framework that works so well and is so flexible just by adding 2 new view controller is genius in my book. Re-implementing your whole phone OS just because manufacturers want to hijack it to build tablets without having to write their own OS, that's pretty dumb if you ask me.

I agree. What we would end up with with is every developer providing @2x as the only image, and the OS has to scale each image for non-retina devices. But the problem is that it's adding an extra performance penalty to the devices that are older and slower, making them even slower, than newer devices.

I get your point tough, however the @2x scheme is not a solution for resolution independence - it's a solution for backwards compatibility, to prevent giving older devices more work to do.

It's in the Quartz 2D app in the developer tools. But be warned - it only serves to test an app you are developing. You will quickly see most apps, including many of Apples's are not ready for resolution independence.

I agree with you that the UI is pretty much the same. We get more icons on the screen than we do with the phone, and we get more apps in folders, a lot more. That's worthy of looking different. I don't agree that it wastes the screen to not have even more. The screen looks less crowded than does the screen for the phone. Too many icons would look terrible. I'm sure Apple had a number of units on the table in front of them and decided that this looked best, while giving us a significant increase.

It's only meant for developers to test their apps against. I've tried it, and don't recommend it. While the UI looks great, and some programs do to, most do not. A lot look terrible to the point of being difficult to use. FCP for example, is horrible. I had to go back quickly.

Actually, they don't scale. Google has made this point very clear. Developers have to specifically indicate in the app to look for a specific screen Rez. There are no Android apps in the Google Marketplace that will work properly with 1024x600, for example, because it's not a Google allowed Rez. Unlike with the iPhone, where the Rez is doubled, and all apps using the lower Rez look at least as good, or even better, that's not always the case for Android. When it comes to the tablet, Apple does have that problem with low phone Rez apps. Hopefully, we will soon get the ability to see high Rez iPhone apps at that Rez on our tablets. But apps that are written for the tablet look great, as expected.

Honeycomb apps don't seem to able to be written in a universal package from what I see. Possibly that's wrong. But if it isn't, it won't be good. We've had complaints that people's phone apps have to be purchased again if the developer decided to not have a universal app. But most apps that are available on both are now universal. How will Android phone owners react if that's never the case for them?

Agreed. As far as I can tell, this is not RI. Apple specifically tags different display resolutions. There isn't a need for RI. RI is needed when Rez isn't known, and can be almost anything. That's not likely going to be the case here. We'll have two rez's for the screens, and it's really not likely that Apple would go higher than 2x what we have now. What would be the point?

Likely same thing for the phone, though some company has a screen that's even higher Rez than what the iPhone has.

It's interesting to look at something Adobe has been looking into. Right now, there are two Adobe apps for the iPad. Both are pretty good at the limited things they do. Adobe, through John Nack's blog, issued a survey as to whether photographers wanted an app for the iPad that would do more than their app does now as far as organizing photos went.

What they got, was photographers saying that no, they didn't want that. What they wanted was Lightroom. I was one of them. But right now, an app like that can't be written. One reason is RAM, but more importantly, Apple is sandboxing RAW images in such a way that doesn't allow that work to be done. I hope that with the new iPad, they will open that up, as it's in very big demand. At least, do it in the summer, with iOS 5.

You can't make raster images (=bitmaps) resolution-independent anyway, they're called bitmaps for a reason, which is because they are exactly that: a grid (map) of pixels (bits). It's a fundamental basic concept in computer graphics, just like scalable vector graphics.

It's exactly like you said: the @2x scheme serves only a single purpose: conserving memory and decreasing GPU load and memory bandwidth requirements on devices that don't benefit from the higher resolution images. It is not a solution to resolution independence, because no solution for resolution independent bitmaps exists. If you want 100% resolution independence, you have to use only scalable graphical elements, and bitmaps are not among them.

Let's try to keep personalities out of this, shall we? Some of these guys do speak on both sides, which you will see if you read their posts more carefully.

Apple is conservative. With today's investor, companies need to be. I remember that when a company came in at the bottom of projections, their stock would go up. Then it had to be the middle. Then the top. Now it has to be over the top. Citigroup just came in with a pretty good report, and their stock got slammed. This is happening all over. It also just happened to intel, despite a great report.

Soon, a company will need to be way over the best projections to keep at the price they were at. It's nuts! It's also partly responsible for all the cheating some companies do, such as stuffing the channel. So if Apple thinks the gross margins might be 39.5%, they might say 39% instead. I don't blame them.

Yes. I have several St's. It did have a better screen, esp. In greyscale. Atari had a lot of firsts. The first monitor to refresh higher than 60Hz. It worked at 70. While a number of wags said that; "You know Atari, they have to be different", the monitor was rock stable. No flickering at all in a time when every monitor, including The Mac's did.

Then it was the first machine to sell for a buck per megabyte of RAM. First machine was the 512, the second was the 1024. I upgraded my machines to 4 Mb by soldering more memory to the chips already there. Fun days.

Publishing Partner, later changed to Pagestream because of a trademark dispute, was as powerful as Pagemaker. I made a number of fonts for it, as early versions didn't use the new Adobe standard. Then I also had Calamus. This was the first time you could see fonts on the screen that were rendered from the vector version rather than using crude bitmaps. This came two years, at least, before Adobe's ATM. Both programs are still around, and work on the Mac and on the PC.

I also still have my three St's, plus a bunch of stuff for them, though I did give the greyscale monitor away. I still have the color version.

It was sad that the Tramile's screwed the company up after initial great success.

They also made the icons different pixel sizes, instead of just expanding iOS/iPhone icons to fit the smaller PPI. They also allowed for more space between icons, which you noted by saying it looked less cramped. They also allowed the Home Screen to be rotated to all possible orientations. Thats just the Home Screen, thats recoding iOS/CocoaTouch specifically for the iPad.

If we say that iPad and iPhone/Touch UIs are exactly the same because they use CocoaTouch to build it, I suppose we need to say that the iOS flavors and Mac OS X are also the exact same because they use OS X/Darwin.

Do we say that Windows desktop and WinMo are the same because they wrote WinMo to mimic Windows desktop as much as possible. Of course not. There are familiar element but that is all we can say.

People, there is just too much insulting going on here today. I gave the first infraction I've given in a long time. Please don't make me give more out.

Sure. While they could do a wildly different UI on the much bigger, higher Rez screen, and there could be a case made for that, there's an advantage to doing it basically the same. People come from the phone/touch and know immediately how to work it. Little new to hold them back. Honeycomb is so different from the phone version that it's almost like an entirely different OS on the surface. Google is deliberately telling people that their tablet is different.

But they are making so many moves that are blatantly aimed at Apple, that I wouldn't be surprised if this was done for that reason too. It's a way for them to pretend that the iPad is just a big phone, the way all the Android tablets out now are. They can point to honeycomb tablets and say; "See, our tablet looks different from our phones, that must make it better". Meanwhile, it just makes it harder for developers.

It does look that way. Google and RiM seem to be trying to make it looks completely different UI (though RiM has an excuse), while MS, as previously noted went the has tried to make its WiMo UI as close to their desktop as possible. At least MS is designing their WP7 for the device, I just hope they follow Apples lead and make it familiar when they redesign it for a tablet. I think its the familiar part that makes some think its the same UI, but as you know I think thats an erroneous assumption.

It's not just today, its every day for the past several months. Its always the same posters, or the same retread sock-puppets of previously banned posters doing the intentional stirring. The non-troll folk here have had enough of it and aren't putting up with anywhere near as much of it as they have in the past couple months.

I haven't posted much in the past couple days because it would be utterly pointless with how unbound the trolling is here now. It's getting close to just folding up the bookmark and moving on because the enjoyment and sense of community is lacking. Everywhere changes, but as long as the community doesn't go toxic it's just a change and we roll with it. But the toxicity here is rising above a healthy level IMNSHO.

I appreciate the volunteerism aspect and time put in to keep things running by the mods and admins. And not to make your, the other mods or admins jobs any harder, but the jobs might be easier if a certain very regular element found they weren't free to troll and embed themselves in the fabric of the community like bedbugs.

It's like pre-PoliticalOutsider fighting has become the norm in all threads without the governmental politics arguments that made it necessary to give that it's own sub-forum in the first place. I don't go there and never have because it was so bad back in the pre-day. It's not good to be seeing the same thing everywhere else.

Yeah, that makes more sense, though his article contains a bunch of little facts so it kinda fits haha.

Do you need a /s tag for you? I mean come on, you act as if I can't make fun of DED's writing style, as in, acerbic, polarizing, or you know less now than you did before lol.

Agreed. The poster of that comment is merely displaying their ignorance of the issues and terminology.

I speak to some people privately, and sometimes it helps. But it can be difficult to decide just who is really trolling, and who seems to be trolling, but who is not. Some people accused of trolling come down on both sides. I'm seeing this in the thread. But no matter how much some people don't like it, people should be allowed to have their say, as long as they don't do it in a taunting manner. Simply stating opinions is not enough. Calling people names is never a way to answer someone else. I get hot myself, and am not a shrinking violet. If I think someone is trolling, I'll say it. But saying that a position is idiotic is one thing, calling a person an idiot is another. The first I'll usually allow-to a certain point, but not the second.

If people really don't like another's posts, they can ignore them, or turn them off. I used to do that to some people, but now I can't, being a mod.

The point behind the iPad is not to have a device to take everywhere. The point is for a device that is ideal for puttering around, doing casual computing, personal media consumption, etc.

Why make a device that is seriously compromised to accommodate portability when in fact the device is not meant for such uses in the first place. All you do is make it less suited to the tasks for which people are flocking to the iPad in extraordinary numbers.

Furthermore Apple thinks 7" is too big for the one UI and too small for the other. I disagree with SJ that it's not possible that a UI could be envisioned for a 7" device but clear Apple's UIs don't work for that size.


+1 I've been moaning on apple.com/feedback for a while now (since 2.x days) and no improvement. Although unless I'm imagining it under 4.2 they demand less attention than they did previously. i.e. you aren't necessarily forced into the notifying app when unlocking the screen.

For the iPhone iOS5 needs to address notifications. For the iPad (not an iPad user here) I think the file handling is a priority for the iPad to play well in the corporate environment. On that subject I really don't see an SD slot on the iPad: the extra storage being removable makes little sense in the iOS we understand today.

Well calling someone a *********************** is quite tame. If I were to call him a person who ***** ***** ****** and **** **** ******, well, that would be more of a ban eh?

I actually didn't know that Adobe had gotten such feedback. As to RAW photo access Apple does need to work on that. Of course right now trying to do anything with RAW on the ipad would be very frustrating for the programmer and probably the user if an app was ever written. Hopefully iPad 2 will come with enough RAM to allow Apple to open things up a bit.

My goal for an iPad App would be for local storage on the go and the ability to mirror or back up to the web. Admittedly I've cut back a whole bunch with respect to photography but even so this is something I'm still interested in. I don't really think people understand how limited the current iPad is due to the lack of RAM, you see it in the apps that have not yet come to the platform. This just has me really interested in just what iPad2 will be able to do.

Great article - truly well thought out and highly analytical. But it begs contemplating how existing iPad applications and content will render properly at this doubled resolution. A related issue is that many iPad developers simply don't develop iPad applications and content on Macs that support this resolution (mostly MacBook Pros). How will they test/view their work unless they have 2048x1536 or larger resolution displays? And possibly the biggest consideration, what about Facetime video chat? The iPad's front-facing camera video resolution won't be much better than VGA - possibly 720p. Facetime video will look very blocky if it's scaled up, no?

No one has to call anyone anything. Object to what's being said. Even make some fun of it if it's thought to be to weird. Just don't call anyone any names, or allude to it.

We can access RAW photos. I use this:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/con...=7-10058-11099

Quite remarkable! But we can't do much more with them.

And I mentioned this product in another thread:

http://www.airstash.com/

I've ordered one.

I tell you what man... if the new iPad really has double the current resolution... I will be dumping my Galaxy Tab for one... that would be pretty special.

deleted

Gruber has spoken. No "retina" display for the iPad. According to his source(s).

Great while it lasted. Of course he or his source could be wrong or disinformed. He's taking bets.

http://daringfireball.net/

Let the declarations of the iPad 2 being a total fail commence.

Dammit! I really didnt want to be right on this one. He covered every point I previously brought up. Against my better judgement I hope his sources are wrong.