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The Retina War is upon us.

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Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#21

Post by densh »

In my opinion Photoshop is absolutely inappropriate tool in this new era. It was never really meant to design user interfaces. Designers should finally stop thinking in terms of pixels as they don't really make any sense if your application will be shown on screens with more than one kind of pixel density.

There should be no problems with using vector graphics on high resolution screens and it will look much better on lower resolution screens than downscaled image. Not only will vector graphics make support of various screen densities easier it may also (significantly) decrease size of assets. Currently on iOS devices developers bundle two images for same purpose (1x and 2x). It could have been one vector image instead.

Please stop using tools which were made to edit images and start using ones which are made to design interfaces.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#22

Post by ChuckMcM »

ilaksh wrote: post #16

Just to clarify, Retina is an Apple brand for a screen with a significantly increased resolution and high pixel density. Its definitely a brand name, so lets not confuse that. Maybe just refer to the actual pixels per inch or even easier, the screen size/type and resolution. MacBook Pro 2012: 2880×1800 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_display

This resonates with something I was thinking too. Basically everyone who has had a web experience hooked up to their 1080p TV has been screwed for a long time. Basically an '800px' layout has sucked for at least 5 years now on both 1920 x 1200 monitors and the aforementioned HD setup. There is no 'Retina' war, there is only web design stuck between the same rock and the same hard place. I feel for them but your tool box has to account for that.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#23

Post by idupree »

michaelpinto wrote: post #2

I think that Retina resolution displays will dominate the field in much less time than ten years: Since every mobile device maker has to match Apple I'd bet that by next year every new phone and tablet will feature a higher resolution screen. maybe that won't be 256, but maybe it will be at least 150. Then you can bet that in at least two years you'll see the same thing happen on laptops — and desktops will have to f…

Yeah, 72/96 is shocking, but look:

We're only just now reaching the point where I can count on my friends having 64-bit CPUs.

Intel's first 64-bit mobile processor was released in mid-2006. That is only six years ago. The manufacturing transition itself was pretty quick - only a year or two until all their currently-manufactured CPUs were 64-bit [AFAIK], if we ignore Atom. Many of my friends have 6-7 year old laptops because they still work and that's all they need.

64-bit was chiefly engineering work: the CPUs didn't cost more to make because of Moore's law [I believe]. I hope that Retina screens are similarly not-more-expensive when made in large quantities. But what if they are a bit more expensive? We'll be cursed with budget 72/96 screens for maybe five more years on top of the length of time people keep their devices!

And it really will be a curse to us, personally, web designers. The Web uses images, and everyone uses the Web.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_64#Intel_64_implementation...

[Disclaimer: I am writing a science game that uses lots of 64-bit integers, so it runs noticably faster when compiled for x86_64 than for x86.]

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#24

Post by AlexandrB »

ilaksh wrote: post #18
nchlswu wrote: post #17

Does anyone else find the 1x and 2x conventions confusing? I never realized it till I got a bit confused reading the article. Also: I'm a bit surprised at the reverence Dustin Curtis is given for the pixel fitting article.

Its not just confusing, its misleading. The marketing copy is being confused for technical terminology. At 2880 pixels wide, the new MacBook Pro resolution is about 1.5 times as many pixels across the screen as a typical high resolution display at 1900 pixels.

> At 2880 pixels wide, the new MacBook Pro resolution is about 1.5 times as many pixels across the screen as a typical high resolution display at 1900 pixels.

A typical high resolution display of what physical size? Using the resolution is meaningless, it's the DPI that's important in this case.

Also, the 2x is not really marketing copy. It's the number of physical pixels that make up each geometric "point" in an Apple retina display. Ideally applications and operating systems would be truly resolution-independent and this ratio could be any decimal number. In such a world, you could chose how to use your screen's resolution - for more space or for smoother rendering of on-screen elements.

Apple's solution is a hack that uses an integer ratio to make backwards compatibility easier. With a 2x ratio you can blow up a point from a non-retina app to exactly 4 pixels, avoiding some hairy rendering issues.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#25

Post by wmf »

dangrossman wrote: post #5
michaelpinto wrote: post #2

I think that Retina resolution displays will dominate the field in much less time than ten years: Since every mobile device maker has to match Apple I'd bet that by next year every new phone and tablet will feature a higher resolution screen. maybe that won't be 256, but maybe it will be at least 150. Then you can bet that in at least two years you'll see the same thing happen on laptops — and desktops will have to f…

Was there any factory capable of producing 15" panels with 220+ LEDs per inch ten years ago?

IBM (now Sony) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

(BTW, LCD != LED.)

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#26

Post by wmf »

ilaksh wrote: post #18
nchlswu wrote: post #17

Does anyone else find the 1x and 2x conventions confusing? I never realized it till I got a bit confused reading the article. Also: I'm a bit surprised at the reverence Dustin Curtis is given for the pixel fitting article.

Its not just confusing, its misleading. The marketing copy is being confused for technical terminology. At 2880 pixels wide, the new MacBook Pro resolution is about 1.5 times as many pixels across the screen as a typical high resolution display at 1900 pixels.

The default mode is 1440x900 doubled, hence all the talk about 2x.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#27

Post by dsirijus »

densh wrote: post #21

In my opinion Photoshop is absolutely inappropriate tool in this new era. It was never really meant to design user interfaces. Designers should finally stop thinking in terms of pixels as they don't really make any sense if your application will be shown on screens with more than one kind of pixel density. There should be no problems with using vector graphics on high resolution screens and it will look much better o…

Illustrator has plenty of numerical errors all around to warrant Photoshop design for perfectionists.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#28

Post by Zirro »

brudgers wrote: post #11

What the cynic in me finds interesting in Retina displays is how people will tend to hit their data caps more quickly on their mobile plan merely because they are downloading more pixels.

"...hit their data caps more quickly on their mobile plan merely because they are downloading more pixels."

Surely the caps will increase in size as a consequence of improved mobile-data-pushing-technologies and to keep up with the need, just like the speeds of broadband-connections have since they were introduced?

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#30

Post by fjorder »

QUESTION: What makes vector graphics based UI's so hard?

I am not a UI designer, so I am ignorant. Please educate me.

Several other posters have mentioned the option of moving away from raster graphics, and indeed this was my own first thought. I remember using IRIX back in the glory-days of SGI. For those who have no idea what I'm blathering on about, IRIX was a professional workstation OS that had en entirely vector based UI. Yes, almost two decades ago an OS existed that was immune to the retina problem. Pause for a moment and let that sink in.

IRIX was actually one of the first GUI-based OS's, and SGI's use of vector-based UI elements probably arose from specific needs SGI faced. I can only speculate on what they were, but one thing they had plenty of was raw power. SGI workstations were very nice in their day! However, the average smartphone built these days probably has more power than all but the last SGI workstations, and perhaps even them too. Processing power is therefore likely not the issue. In fact, given that most desktop OS's already render your desktop in a 3D environment (OSX, Win7, and Linux (depending on what you're running) all do this), vector UI elements may actually be less intensive to draw than raster elements in these situations!

Wild speculation: Is it that UI building tools and API's make working with vector graphical elements painful, or are UI designers just ignorant after almost a decade without a major vector-based OS in common use?

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