Now that the new Macbook Pro is coming out with a Retina Display, there are a lot of resources out there on how to make Mac apps and now even websites "Retina Display Friendly". Even Google is updating Chrome for Retina Display...
Why is this necessary at all? From what I understand, Retina Display is just a higher resolution screen. Right?
I thought when you develop gui's for desktop software and develop websites, you are developing something that is supposed to work and scale properly with virtually any resolution... When you resize an app's window, or display it on a higher or lower resolution display, it is supposed to scale and display properly.
So why are these people coming out with guides on how to make something look good on a Retina Display? Shouldn't it already look fine by default? Is there something about Retina Display that I'm not understanding?
And for the record, I'm not talking about iPhone 4 Retina Display. Most iOS dev's make their apps with fixed position elements since they know the screen's won't change size/shape. So I understand the importance of developing an app to look good on the iPhone 4/s vs 3g/s.
With the Retina display apps don't actually scale like they're being resized, all the controls are resized to be twice as big. If an app would be scaled normally, not by scaling all the controls, etc. you wouldn't see anything, because everything would be too small. It's the same difference between a Retina and a lower-resolution display as on the iPhone 3GS / iPhone 4.
An example:
These images are actually the same size, just the pixel densities differ.
And here's how it looks not properly scaled (using some app to disable proper scaling):
http://cloudmancer.com/images/trueretina.jpg
I thought when you develop gui's for desktop software and develop websites, you are developing something that is supposed to work and scale properly with virtually any resolution... When you resize an app's window, or display it on a higher or lower resolution display, it is supposed to scale and display properly (StackOverflow, for example, uses a 960px-wide container).
From a web developer standpoint, you are often asked to develop fixed-width websites (ranging from normally 940 to 1000 pixels wide), and they don't get to scale at all. There are a lot of websites like this and many apps just aren't designed to increase in size.
Also, apps that do grow in size usually expect that a bigger resolution also means a bigger screen, so they simply stretch the main application panels and are done with it.
Now, consider static elements, like a 150x50 button that says 'Click me'. This button is not intended to become bigger and is perfectly acceptable on a regular 1440x900 display. Now the retina screen comes in with its 2580x1800 resolution. The app sees the resolution change but it thinks "Hey, that user must have a huge screen" so it keeps the button the same size.
The problem that now occurs is that the button, because both resolutions apply to the same 13" screen, is now appearing to be a fraction of the size of the original button. Depending on your user vision, he might not be able to read the text on it, and might have a hard time clicking it, depending on the mouse settings.
To fix that problem, Apple and Microsoft used two different solutions:
Microsoft decided to tell the app the display had a 2580x1800 resolutions, but that the user wanted to have everything scaled to 200 dpi. This means that, if an app does not follow the guidelines, it will look smaller. Many apps simply ignore the DPI settings (though this might change with Windows 8);
Apple decided to report to apps that the resolution of the monitor was 1440x900, but that it could display higher-resolution elements if asked to; This means that apps existing before the new retina settings will appear to be the same size as before for the end-user (with added benefits like crisper text if they use the default Apple APIs), but that they can decide to provide high-DPI images that will look much better on the display.
Both solutions requires apps to be aware that the display is high-DPI ('retina'), but the way Apple handled it means the static websites and apps mentioned earlier will keep looking just fine, except they wont have super-crisp, high-resolution images to use. And, to opt-in to the retina features, they have to provide 200x200 images for a 100x100 canvas, for example, and Apple will take care of the rest.
Related
I have a kha app that runs perfecly on an iPad2 (1024/768px).
When I run the same project on a later iPad Mini with 2048/1516. My coordinates are all half the size, which kinda makes sense.
So when I double all the sizes of my objects and GFX it will work on the iPad mini, but will be too big for iPad2.
I looked into a backbuffer and a renderTarget as explained here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV1PTo5XSCA
There is also the windowSize option in khafile, which seems to do nothing.
Surface x and y coodinates always seem to come in in real screen coodrdinates of the device.
What is the best way to write a resolution independent app?
Perfect would be a way that is either retina or non-retina, depending on the device, where the code stays the same.
According to https://github.com/Kode/Kha/wiki/Screen-Size-and-Scaling there's automated scaling for some targets. If you need other targets you have to manually scale everything to fit the screen.
The page mentions using this class for the task: https://github.com/Kode/Kha/blob/master/Sources/kha/Scaler.hx
Also you could take a look at how Wyngine does it:
https://github.com/laxa88/wyngine/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=scale & https://github.com/laxa88/wyngine/blob/master/Wyngine.hx
You replied (to my comment) that scaling wasn't enough. So far it was enough for all of my games with the right display settings, but if you really need retina sized graphics you always have the option of using multiple graphics sets. Eg:
a set for retina resultion (eg iPad 3)
a default resolution (eg iPad 2) set at half retina size
a low res set for cheap android devices?
At startup of your app you check the screen size. You use that to choose the internal game size and the graphics set that fits the actual screen resolution the best. The internal game size as well as all X/Y positions for the selected graphics set can be calculated by applying the graphics sets scale factor to the raw base values.
Finally you use Scale.scale() to scale your game from the internal game size to fit devices like the iPad pro 12" and the wide variety of Android devices.
That approach is common with a lot of game engines, google should find you links like https://v-play.net/doc/vplay-different-screen-sizes/ that also explain screen ratios and how those can be handled.
I just need to create a single page website in Photoshop, the display has to be optimized for PC, tablet, phone etc. Which resolution do I work in to achieve this?
You will have to create several designs that are suited for those devices that you expect to be typical. Decisions depend on the product you are selling and the personae of the typical clients.
Since you are doing a single page app the exact height is not as critical but you still need to design to several base heights for the various devices and get the developer to just display more background to fit.
The screen size for PCs is increasing but usually a good bet is to go for either 1280 or 1400 wide. For tablets and phones there is an ever increasing set of form factors. Note that many tablets can display higher than a typical PC, its your call how high you want to support. Google for advice or read here.
So designers choose to do the smallest form factor first to identify the key information and content and then create the next width up etcetera.
I usually design for at least three screen sizes (as defined by research of my clients expected users) and set some guidelines on how the various elements degrade as width in/decreases so the developer knows how to setup his CSS correctly and hopefully support new devices that come to market without a redesign.
I'm working on my first winjs app for windows 8.1. So I'm a newbie in this topic, so please forgive me if I ask something obvious.
My problem is the resolution of the target machine (DELL Latitude E7440 with touch screen) is 1920x1080, but when I run the app, it runs in 1370x771. Which is a bit confusing for me.
So my question is, how can I tell the app to run in the same resolution as the OS runs.
Strange thing I discovered: If I set the "Change the size of apps text, and other items on the screen (...)" settings from larger to default in the display settings then suddenly my app runs in the desired full hd resolution. But I don't wanna depend on this setting.
I know I could use ViewBox control, but all of the graphics and everything is designed for full hd resolution, so ViewBox would simply scale it down, this solution sounds a bit ridiculous considering I have a full hd laptop, and full hd design as well...
This app is only for this particular machine, so I don't have to deal with different resolutions.
Any tip/suggestion is highly appreciated.
Windows abstracts the physical device resolution specifically so you don't have to think about scaling issues. Just do your work against the resolution that's reported from the API. This is done because a high pixel density display can result in UI that's too small to be usable, e.g. touch targets that get too small for fingers. Most of the time, then, a 1920x1080 display that's on a smaller physical device (e.g. 13" or smaller screens) gets a 140% scaling factor applied, hence it reports something closer to 1366x768.
Generally speaking, then, if you write responsive CSS for layout then you really don't need to worry about scaling at all with the exception of providing raster graphics that can work at the 100%, 140%, and 180% scaling plateaus (and 240% on Windows Phone 8.1).
For more details refer to my free ebook from Microsoft Press, Programming Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, 2nd Edition, which you can also read (free) within the Microsoft Press Guided Tour app in the Store. Page 42 (Chapter 1) has a short overview on Views and Resolution Scaling; the Branding Your App section on page 113 talks about sizes of logo/splashscreen images for different resolutions, and then Chapter 8, "Layout and Views" (starting on page 421) goes into all the details, especially "Screen Resolution, Pixel Density, and Scaling" on page 437.
Suppose I want to make a Web application which uses a fixed width and height, and I want the interface to fit on screen for common screen resolutions. Assume the application will only be used on laptops and workstations (and not on mobile devices), and it will be used by IT professionals.
What is the largest possible size I can make the application? I think the key considerations here are what is the smallest screen resolution commonly used and how much space to reserve for browser chrome, which may depend on whether the user has toolbars installed, etc.
Or should I make all the page elements resizable and go with fluid layout? That seems like it might be quite a lot of work.
Fluid layouts are great if your design works for it.
Otherwise, 960px wide is very common and works in pretty much any browser on a 1024x768 screen resolution (which is still VERY common).
As for height, people are generally okay with scrolling down, but if you need it in one window then you have to stay under about 500-600px depending on browser and what toolbars the user has installed.
960x600 pixels
You could use an analytics tool to figure out what resolution your current users are running.
You might try making only part of the layout fixed, and then using CSS's max-width/min-width and max-height/min-height to constrain what you must. Have decoration be fluid as much as it can (e.g. large background images shouldn't force the browser to be 1600px wide; just show as much as possible in the width available in the user's browser, without horizontal scrollbars; try setting the container width to 100%).
You could put a min-width of maybe 30em on a main text column, for comfortable reading (see Ideal line length for content), and perhaps an upper limit of something wide but still readable. It is unpleasant when browsing a site with a layout that crams the content into a small, fixed-size box, especially when it's only for the sake of preserving their design. If your design requires dynamic content to fit within a fixed size, the design could probably use some more thought.
I'm currently designing my first ever GUI for Windows. I'm using MFC and Visual Studio 2008. The monitor I have been designing my program on has 1680x1050 native resolution. If I compile and send my program to one of my coworkers to run on their computer (generally a laptop running at 1024x768), my program will not fit on their screen.
I have been trying to read up on how to design an MFC application so that it will run on all resolutions, but I keep finding misleading information. Everywhere I look it seems that DLUs are supposed to resize your application for you, and that the only time you should run into problems is when you have an actual bitmap whose resolution you need to worry about. But if this is the case, why will my program no longer fit on my screen when I set my monitor to a lower resolution? Instead of my program "shrinking" to take up the same amount of screen real estate that it uses at 1680x1050, it gets huge and grainy.
The "obvious" solution here is to set my resolution to 1024x768 and redesign my program to fit on the screen. Except that I've already squished everything on my dialogs as much as possible to try and get my program to fit on screen running at 1024x768. My dialog fonts are set to Microsoft Sans Serif 8 but still appear huge (much larger than 8 points) when running at 1024x768.
I know there HAS to be a way to make my program keep the same scaling... right? Or is this the wrong way to approach the problem? What is the correct/standard way to go about designing an MFC program so that it can run on many resolutions, say 800x600 and up?
I assume your application GUI is dialog based (the main window is a dialog)?
In that case you have a problem, because, as you discovered, MFC has no support for resizing a dialog correctly. Your options are:
Redesign your GUI to use a SDI or MDI GUI.
Use a dialog resize extension. There are many available, for some very good suggestions see this question. Another options are this one and this one.
Don't use MFC. wxWidgets has much better support for dialog resizing.
MFC is only a thin wrapper over the Windows API. They both make an assumption which is hardly ever true: if you have a higher resolution screen, you'll adjust the DPI or font size in Windows to get larger characters. Most of the time, a larger screen size means a larger physical monitor, or a laptop where you want to squeeze as much information into a small screen as possible; people value more information over greater detail. Thus the assumption fails.
If you can't squeeze your entire UI into the smallest size screen you need to support, you'll have to find another way to make it smaller. Without knowing anything about your UI, I might suggest using tabs to group the controls into pages.
I've had good luck making my windows resizable, so that people with larger screens can see more information at once. You need to do this the hard way, responding to the WM_SIZE message to the window and deciding which controls should be made larger and which ones should just move.
There is no automatic way to resize the content of your dialogs when resolution changes. So, you need to set some boundaries.
Option 1.
If you are developing your app for customers, pick one minimum resolution (like 1024x7678), redesign you dialogs so that everything fits. Maybe break up some into several, or use tab strip control.
Option 2.
Create separate dialog forms for each resolution you'd like to support, but use the same class to handle it. At runtime detect resolution and use the appropriate form.
Option 3.
Write your own resizing functionality, so that user could adjust the size of your dialogs to his liking.