What iPad’s Rumored 260 dpi Display Might Mean for Developers
According to MacRumors, the iPad 2 which should be coming along later this quarter, is scheduled to have a 260 pixels-per-inch “Retina” display, though there is some dispute over whether or not the display, which has a lower pixel density, really counts as a retina display.
As a guy who (happily) used a netbook for about a year and a half as his primary computer, I think people are missing the forest for the trees. A display at 260 dpi, at 9″ yields a screen resolution of 2048×1536! My netbook, and just about every one of them of its generation (frustratingly) is only 1024×600. Doubling that resolution (and nearly tripling it on the vertical end) will make a no-doubt better, more crisp viewing experience. I didn’t dive into the first iPad because of its myriad shortcomings (and a lack of initial content), but having played with them at work and enjoyed the now flourishing application support it has, I am probably going to (possibly literally) be in line for the next gen iPad as soon as it’s available.
When I started at Appiction, they had me slicing images for development, and a lot of the projects that I got into for graphic design came in a mad flurry, where I was getting and slicing up 2 or 3 projects per week. For those who don’t know, slicing involves taking those mocked-up final art pieces and making images out of them that can be used for development. Since Appiction rarely designs things with the standard Coco toolkit available in Apple’s Interface Builder (instead relying on flashier designs even for mundane things like navbars), we would have to export out fancy task bars for the developers. It took a bit longer (one method, the Interface Builder method, literally involves dragging and dropping the navbar you want, the other, what we did on projects, involves creating an entire new object from the image of a navbar), but the results are typically more visually interesting, especially compared to Apple’s standard apps, which can look a bit more mundane by their familiarity.
In slicing applications up, it was a joy to learn that the iPhone 4’s resolution was precisely double the iPhone 3GS and below, from 640 x 960 to 320 x 480. This allowed a very simple scheme for developing applications, where we would export out both sizes for development. If you’ve ever wondered why on your iPhone 4 some of the un-updated app icons for retina display look fuzzy, that’s why. There is a lot more detail that can be shown on the iPhone 4’s screen, since each pixel is doubled.
What this means for an iPad at 260 dpi is an extremely high resolution interface, but for developers, a relatively minor headache. Apple supports the double resolution with the “@2x” extension on file names, allowing devs to simply label a navbar at 130 dpi (on the original iPad) simply “navbar.png” and the 260 dpi “Retina” display “navbar@2x.png”. The compiler handles the rest. Simple!
My friends have been asking me to talk a bit more about Android but the thing with Android is that this ease simply doesn’t exist. While Android has a bit more robust feature set for slicing images and buttons that is integrated all over the application (for instance, you can make a start-up screen for an application compatible with every Android device, past, present and future, by instituting some smarter design standards that I’ve tried to help start here at Appiction), it’s not so simple in a fully immersive application where you are redesigning the entire interface, such as a game.
Android resolutions don’t neatly scale up – rather Android supports resolutions like 640×800 and 640 x 854 simultaneously. Some of this is philosophically consistent, but in terms of providing the same robust application space (especially in gaming) that you see on the iOS platforms, I think the jury is still out. I think it’s a bit unwise of Google to not instill some controls on the types of products their OS runs on, or alternatively, to provide a space in which users recognize that their device is not a “universal” device, but that it will have the horsepower and specs to run some applications, but not others. Kind of like what existed with Windows gaming in the 90’s, and to some extent, today.
What I do know is that as an iOS developer and designer, I’m heartened to hear that the iPad 2 might simply double the original iPad resolution. Doing so would demonstrate the sort of forward-thinking that will allow development on iOS to thrive for years to come.
