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The Retina War is upon us.

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Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#61

Post by wmf »

tharax wrote: post #57
AlexandrB wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 App…

Isn't that ratio 4x then? Or am I not understanding retina displays correctly?

2x linear, 4x area. I could swear we had this discussion yesterday.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#63

Post by fjorder »

nathos wrote: post #43
mitchty wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One other facet of vector graphics, they don't always look that great at all scales. I seem to recall a graphics designer blog that compared a vector to an image that was tweaked at the same scale resolutions. The differences were staggering. I don't think vector graphics are a panacea anymore. I'll see if I can find the link, was rather eye opening.

Relevant links in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252640

One of the big things I noticed in the first link there was that a SVG icon scaled to different sizes didn't look as good as a hand-optimised set of raster icons, largely due to issues that could conceivable be addressed. e.g. When the SVG icon was scaled, the lines defining the shape also scaled up in thickness so that they appeared far too chunky in the largest version. What if line-width were kept constant as the SVG was scaled?

While that link makes me appreciate that SVG speficially might be hard to work with and that simply scaling everything proportionally might not make for good icons across all sizes, I remain unconvinced that vector icons are hopeless. Perhaps SVG's have the ability to do what I describe above, or perhaps we need a more powerful vector graphics format to work with.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#64

Post by [deleted] »

cpr wrote: post #44
wmf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really nothing hard about using vectors; they'll just be blurry because they're probably not pixel-fitted. Also, complex icons are much smaller and faster to render in raster format.

Of course, for Retina displays, those small vector-based graphics will look great. For everyone else, they'll be blurry. So maybe that will simply add to the "tough for non-Retina users" momentum...

[deleted]

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#65

Post by _1tem »

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…

Name some really good software for designing interfaces.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#66

Post by modfodder »

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…

What is an example of software made to design interfaces?

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#67

Post by stan_rogers »

scotty79 wrote: post #51
AlexandrB wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 App…

Resolution is only thing that matters. It tells how much information you can cram into a screen. If pixels are too large move back. If they are too small move closer. If your screen is glued to the keyboard. Detach it. Like in asus transformer.

The point of these displays is to (eventually) get away from slavery to the pixel. Just because a printer can render, say, 4800 dpi, doesn't mean you want to render your body copy in a 1pt text (which it can do with better letter-shape fidelity than any of my old dot-matrix impact printers); you still print at 9 or 10 points and enjoy sharper and better-defined type. Moving to high-linear-resolution screens does the same thing—you don't cram more stuff into the screen, you cram a better version of the same stuff into the screen.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#68

Post by seanmcdirmid »

spaghetti wrote: post #13

I enjoy the high pixel density displays on small devices like iPhone 4. However the iPad 3's display doesn't really interest me. I just don't hold the device that close to my eyes. Snappy, responsive UIs are the most important thing to me. I'll trade the animations, rounded-corners, gradients, drop shadows and bouncy effects for a more craigslist-like UI. Something that's simple, basic and functional.

I've been using the new iPad for a few months now and I'm always bothereed to back to an iPad 2 for reading. I can just see the pixels on the iPad2 now, I didn't before, but now they bother me. Blast Apple for raising my standards!

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#69

Post by paulirish »

nathos wrote: post #40
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…

Vector graphics are not a panacea: http://simurai.com/post/19895985870/icon-sharpness-limbo http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...

They're not a panacea but they are an enormous upgrade from your 1x raster.

I liken this situation a lot to adapting a site to multiple devices with media queries. Does it help? Oh hell yes. Would a unique mobile site be better? Probably, if you had the time and resources to commit to it.

Of course custom raster will look better, but I don't think it's realistic for most teams. If you didn't handcraft the pixels of your favicon you're not a candidate. Vector solves much of the problem and will continue to, even when new densities come out.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#70

Post by paulirish »

rorrr wrote: post #41
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…

HTML doesn't support vector images well. Yeah, you have SVG in modern browsers, but which one is easier? or (fails in IE8- and IE9 quirks)

You can do in IE9 and every other browser. In fact, you can do an inline image inside of your HTML in all those browsers as well. The is long gone.
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