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Comment by ktizo | Hacker News Reader

Why are they faking the resolution? Is it that the graphics card has problems, or is it to make their own apps look nicer than competitors, or what? I hope they are not rescaling stuff like photoshop to something other than actual screen res, otherwise they will severely piss off graphics professionals even more than they managed with the Mac Pro workstation non-upgrade.

[edit] reading through the article, it seems that they've either gone and broken the word 'resolution', or Anand is very confused.

At 1440 x 900 you don't get any increase in desktop resolution compared to a standard 15-inch MacBook Pro, but everything is ridiculously crisp.

I have read this sentence three times and it still makes no sense unless the word 'resolution' has been completely mauled by marketing idiots.

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> Why are they faking the resolution?

Because bitmap-based applications (which is all of them) designed for 110 DPI are unusable at 220 dpi, you can barely click the buttons.

> I hope they are not rescaling stuff like photoshop to something other than actual screen res

From the keynote, I would guess they are unless the application "opts in" to HiDPI support, as with iOS. HiDPI applications would be rendered in "true resolution" (2880x1800), non-HiDPI ones are automatically scaled to the specified global setting (for non-native controls, native controls probably use native rendering in all cases)

> I have read this sentence three times and it still makes no sense unless the word 'resolution' has been completely mauled by marketing idiots.

It scales bitmaps, but text is rendered at native resolution (or so I'd guess), so the text and "native" UI elements are going to be extremely crisp, because they'll be rendered with 4 times the usual amounts of pixels for the same physical size.

They clearly stated in the keynote that Adobe is working on a retina version of Photoshop.

So the current existing version of photoshop can't access all the pixels then? Excuse me while I scream in horror and dismay.

> So the current existing version of photoshop can't access all the pixels then?

It can if you set the global resolution to 2880x1800, but because most UI elements are likely bitmapped it'll be unusable: a 30px button will remain 30px, but will be a quarter the physical surface.

It can if you set the global resolution to 2880x1800

According to the article, you can only set a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1200 within the UI and it resamples that up.

Actually, at 3840x2400 then downsample.

It didn't look like you could set it to 2880x1800 (1:1), unless I missed something.

Ah well, that would be sad. Though maybe not surprising either (after reading the article, it looks like the "emulated" resolutions are limited but games get access to the native resolution).

As a bitmap editor, it can access 100 times those pixels.

As a GUI, it renders as it always did in Retina resolution, i.e it is not shows it's buttons and labels any more detailed, or any smaller. This is how every non-Retina ready app behaves.

That doesn't affect how big an image it can edit at all.

So, what "horror and dismay"?

It should be ready just in time for Photoshop CS7.

Because the UI is too small at the real resolution.

UI can scale perfectly well without faking resolutions.

> UI can scale perfectly

I've yet to see any platform where this is the case.

Windows 8 Metro, supposedly. They designed it to be either vector graphics or for bitmaps you have to supply multiple sizes. The largest size is chosen so that higher resolutions than that won't be neccesary because the human eye can't perceive it, so it will be future proof (at least that's what their marketing says).

FWIW, that's exactly the approach Apple has taken with both iOS and OS X. Some elements are rendered as vector graphics, most are rendered as bitmaps and the app provides a 1x and 2x bitmap.

Both Qt and Gtk are really good at that.

OSX UIs are generally bitmap - they actually don't scale well at all to high pixel density.

They are scaling them, is just they are scaling everything rather than allowing user control. I like scaling of stuff, as long as any window that I choose to push to native resolution goes to native resolution, especially on a machine that expensive. And I don't expect to have to go out and rebuy lots of software to enable that.

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