I wonder if it will be possible to opt-in to 1:1 pixel rendering on the iPhone6+ after all, particularly for opengl/metal/video playback. It seems the downscale hack is mostly required for UIKit backwards compatibility and to maintain approximately equal physical sizes for UI elements only. Very nice visualization in the OP, by the way!
This isn't even always possible with Apple's software on a retina MacBook with OS X, and vexes me to this day. QuickTime won't play video back at 1:1 without setting the entire display to 1:1.
At least there is a way to set the mode to 1:1, though. There's several tools that are able to switch the retina macbook into 2880x1800.
Stupid question, but why the point resolution for the iphone 6+ isn't a perfect divider of the pixel resolutions like it is for the other iphones? Since there is more than one point resolution anyway. And also, how is it different for android devices?
Not stupid at all, I still don't understand the reasoning behind it.
So if you want to watch a 1080 video on this device, the player will upscale it to 1242 and then the hardware will downscale it to 1080 again? or will there be some way to bypass all this?
The downscaling in the info graphic is representational of how a developers chrome is handled. Not of a "full screen" experience...
Or put another way, when you play a video, you let the OS take over the full screen and there's no need for downsampling.
Its not like the downsampling is a permanent stage of some rendering pipeline to the display.
I wonder if it will be possible to opt-in to 1:1 pixel rendering on the iPhone6+ after all, particularly for opengl/metal/video playback. It seems the downscale hack is mostly required for UIKit backwards compatibility and to maintain approximately equal physical sizes for UI elements only. Very nice visualization in the OP, by the way!
The downsampling is representational of how the OS renders your App.
Especially in Metal, but probably in OpenGL, I'm sure you get access to the actual resolution buffer you can render into.
I'm not a UX designer by any stretch, but as a consumer I can say that if Apple can pull off the downsampling/downscaling correctly, good on them. I have a Kindle Fire HDX 7", and recently upgraded to a Fire HDX 8.9". The former is 1920x1200 and 323 PPI, the latter is 2560x1600 and 339 PPI. That's not a huge difference in PPI in fact it's far less than the difference in the two new iPhones, yet so many apps (mostly g…
Have they gotten the experience correct? Serious question, I haven't seen them.
They did it! This nice page explaining the resolution differences etc. made me want to click the "paintcode" link at the bottom of the page. This is hard to pull off well, and I think they did it.
Stupid question, but why the point resolution for the iphone 6+ isn't a perfect divider of the pixel resolutions like it is for the other iphones? Since there is more than one point resolution anyway. And also, how is it different for android devices?
Not a stupid question as you've hit on the major strategic bit of news here that most people, I think, are missing. Displays are cut from larger pieces of display material at a given PPI. So Apple focused on perfecting a 163PPI display material and then tended to use it on multiple products. They'd do the same thing for the retina display material as well (I think at one point the iPhone and iPad used the same displa…
That explains the pixel size, but not the point size. Why not make the logical resolution 360x640 with perfect 3x upscale?
My best guess is because this would then be smaller than the iphone 6 size (in points) at a larger physical size so everything would look "too big"...
This fuss about the iPhone screens is, to me at least, hilarious. A good part of my career has been being the "Android guy" in organisations where for better or worse the products would de facto lead on iOS. The number one headache was designers pushing "pixel perfect design" which is doable on Android, but is a pointless headache when your tiny screen is 720p or higher. The fact Apple have a phone coming out for whi…
Since the points are rendered in pixel-perfect form and then down sampled on the iPhone 6+, the only potential loss of fidelity is in the downsampling step. Since we're in an age of not even being able to see pixels, there should be no fidelity loss. The image displayed will be rendered at a higher resolution than the display, and thus every pixel on the ultimate display will be "perfect". Back when pixels were big e…
I wonder if Apple's ios7/Yosemite icon designs are a shift in this direction to vectors. E.g. the icons look like they are authored as a vector. But, I wonder if the platform APIs are not yet ready to handle vectors everywhere and seamlessly between pixel/vector formats.
Not a stupid question as you've hit on the major strategic bit of news here that most people, I think, are missing. Displays are cut from larger pieces of display material at a given PPI. So Apple focused on perfecting a 163PPI display material and then tended to use it on multiple products. They'd do the same thing for the retina display material as well (I think at one point the iPhone and iPad used the same displa…
That explains the pixel size, but not the point size. Why not make the logical resolution 360x640 with perfect 3x upscale? My best guess is because this would then be smaller than the iphone 6 size (in points) at a larger physical size so everything would look "too big"...
I believe this is because Apple wants the logical size to correspond (roughly) with physical size. This is particularly important for user interfaces. A button needs to be sized for the human finger that is tapping it and thus should be the same physical size on each device, which in turn means it should take up a smaller percentage of the logical size of the bigger devices. The only case I know of where they broke this was the iPad mini, which has the same logical size as the larger iPad, and you may notice that everything on the iPad mini is just smaller.
