IOS 6 Automatically Scales to Fit Taller 1136x640 iPhone Display | Hacker News Reader

IOS 6 Automatically Scales to Fit Taller 1136x640 iPhone Display

macrumors.com

40 pointsashishgandhi33 comments

Note the lack of stretching; it just increases the amount of space in between the rows of icons.

I'm kind of sold on the idea that apple is sold on the idea that old apps should work on new screen sizes either without any scaling, or with integer scaling (eg. 2x, 3x, etc). A taller display that keeps the 640 width would let them put old apps right in the new display, no scaling necessary. They could either fill the extra pixels with black, the dock, or widgets of some sort. Ideally all three with the user able to customize.

Anyone know the height in pixels of the iphone dock?

> it just increases the amount of space in between the rows of icons.

iOS 6 is on the left, with 5 on the right. It's not before/after.

What you see is iOS 6 not "increases the amount of space", but add another row of icons.

My iPhone 4 s with iOS 5.1 has 4x4 icons. The new widescreen (tallscreen?) iPhone will apparently have 4x5 icons.

I don't think legacy apps will auto-scale. I think they'll take up the same number of pixels, but the extra screen real estate will have a widget bar, showing things like the weather or stock prices.

"the extra screen real estate will have a widget bar, showing things like the weather or stock price"

I highly doubt it. That would be very un-Apple. I think there are a lot of legacy apps that will scale automatically to utilize the extra height, or there will just be a little black bar above/below the legacy app, so the app takes up the same amount of vertical pixels that it used to.

I'd expect blank space filling above the app (in portrait) or to the sides of the app (in landscape). Anything besides this would be very un-Apple.

When you run an iPhone app on the iPad, there are no such widgets.

From above the page indicators to the bottom of the screen is roughly 176 to 180 pixels on the retina iPhone.

Only reason I can see for this vertical stretch is to add more battery to power a 4G device. Yes, it's more pixels, and a lot people want more pixels, but aspect ratio was a deep design choice made many moons ago by Jobs.

In the background, I see engineering getting a bit more clout under the industrial engineer CEO. And I wonder if culturally the institution is asking itself if perhaps nature truly cannot be pitched, bullied, or cajoled into what cannot be done. Cancer will do that to a family.

http://www.zdnet.com/iphone-5-rumor-roundup-7000002138/

The reason is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16:9 (divide then compare)

Personally I don't like that format on notebooks as I prefer vertical space for programming, but I'm not asked anything...

Still I think iPhone can be OK. Real "fullscreen" 16:9 videos on iPhone, if that's really going to be the resolution. Whatever.

"aspect ratio was a deep design choice made many moons ago by Jobs"

any source for this?

So they are adding 176px to the height of the display? Any idea why they would do that? Apple usually goes for something new exciting, when introducing new products. "We made the iPhone5 taller and added a few pixels on top, so it can display 5 icons on the home screen" sounds like the anti-thesis of excitement.

Most importantly it allows for more usable screen space when the keyboard is open. In some iOS apps at the current resolution you can end up with less than 30% of the display being usable with the keyboard open.

Since the display is larger and a more suitable aspect ratio for widescreen movies, movie viewing will probably effectively get a ~30-40% larger space.

I've always preferred Apple's 3:2 aspect ratio to the more common 16:9 (used by most flagship Android phones, like the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S III). I use my phone almost exclusively in portrait mode, so I think the advantages of 3:2 in portrait mode far outweigh the advantage of watching widescreen videos in landscape mode.

It will be enhanced in portait mode, showing more information at a time, and also more content when the keyboard is up, as mentioned.

Original: http://9to5mac.com/2012/08/07/upcoming-ios-6-is-scalable-to-...

Adding the extra row for apps isn't revolutionary or surprising. And that's fine. I don't think Apple is going to try to sell this larger sized screen as either.

Rather, I think it's going to be what Apple decides to do with this extra space that has the potential to be a big reveal. These extra pixels, when running previous resolution apps, is the talk of the town right now. And if Apple can find a new and interesting way to deal with this extra space, alleviating designer/developer headache while providing extra value to the user, then we'll have something noteworthy.

This new alone is kinda boring.

This could simply be a result of Apple switching to a responsive layout system with iOS6. This correlates with the new automatic layouts you can create in Interface Builder (if you're the sort to use it, and which themselves could correlate with an increasing screen size ;)) There have been as many icon layout changes as there have been major iOS versions - at least, within SpringBoard itself.

I'll gladly eat my doubt if they do end up making the screen taller.

As an aside, did it bother anybody else that the author put the vertical pixel count before the horizontal count?

Anyone know how they got the simulator to work at a different height?

On my system, there is a file at

  /Applications
  /Xcode.app
  /Contents
  /Developer
  /Platforms
  /iPhoneSimulator.platform
  /Developer
  /Applications
  /iPhone Simulator.app
  /Contents
  /Resources
  /Devices
  /iPhone (Retina).deviceinfo 
  /info.plist

That file contains (among others), these fragments:

  <key>height</key>
  <string>960</string>

  <key>width</key>
  <string>640</string>

I haven't tried it, but that is where my hacking would start. The simulator app is signed. It may not be possible to use it after editing it. Mu next attempt would be to sign it with your own key. If that fails, too, I would try and intercept the reading of the file. It may be easiest to put Xcode on some user-mode filesystem that you control.

Tried it, and there's apparently more to it than that. When I change the resolution that "Device" disappears from the Hardware submenu. Other changes to the plist, (e.g. the name of the device) leave it working.

One possibility might be writing a SIMBL plugin. I hacked the iOS simulator before using SIMBL in order to do things like modify the multitouch input indicators, and other views. Dangerous and fun territory.

Haven't tried this yet, but this sounds like it should work:

http://0xced.blogspot.co.at/2012/08/prepare-your-apps-for-ne...

HN discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353004

Also looking for this -- do tell if you come across it.

Reading this, my guess is they will be replacing the physical home button with screen area. They may also have found a way to put the top speaker (but what about camera & sensors ??) under the display somehow. Any way, I hope the next iPhone won't be much taller itself.

Mockups, loose parts, and the rumors all agree that the physical home button will be staying put, just slightly smaller than before.

If you are hoping for the new iPhone to be anything other than EXACTLY what we've seen to date, you're going to be severely let down.

This is Gizmodo with the iPhone 4 in their hands people, we may not have a working lost device in the wild but we have the next best thing. Parts that are clearly for the new iPhone.

It's over, the speculation should now rest on the internals. Those hoping for a virtual home button, wider screen, or a plastic back are SOL and we already know this. It may or may not have NFC though, that sort of stuff is still up in the air.

However it will be taller, it will still have a physical home button, and it will have the two-tone & all in one design we've seen floating around. I would bet my life on it.

This is a great guess that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. A simple elongation of the phone really doesn't fit in any mental model I have of Apple's design decisions.

Why do you say that? It makes sense to me.

Apple just isn't into changing stuff like that for changes' sake. Here, there is very little downside. You get more screen space for lists and pages in portrait, proper 16:9 in landscape, your thumb doesn't have do do more work or travelling, and UI elements aren't blown up or shrunk, all while satisfying the public's demand for a bigger screen.

Seems pretty perfect to me, and moreover it is already set in stone. We've seen the iPhone 5, it's the two tone metal casing design that's floating around. It'll be longer, the glass parts make that clear.

Assuming otherwise is just hoping blindly against the evidence. Every time there has been a big leak like this regarding Apple, it ends up proving to be the final design. Happened with the fat Nano, happened with the iPhone 4 and it has happened again with the 5.

Potentially-silly question: the iOS simulator is x86, not ARM, and therefore cannot install App Store applications. Where did the Pinterest, Wolfram Alpha, etc. apps in these screenshots come from?

Are these included by default in iOS 6? (_And_ in the simulator?)

They could be Web Apps installed to the home screen.

In fact, unless Apple has an app now, I'm fairly certain they are.

My favorite comment at MacRumors:

'But now dock can only hold one icon. Is nonsense~!'

Now I'm curious to see what all the other apps look like in that resolution.

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