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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

The entire iOS app ecosystem has been built upon the idea of 'pixel perfection,' and now this historical focus on perfection has ironically put many, and perhaps most, iOS developers in the position of having to modify their apps to support a growing variety of specific-to-the-pixel screen resolutions.

In the interim, users have to put up with ugly artifacts like black bars and up-sampled graphics.

PS. The Android team's decision to provide from early on a resolution-independent GUI framework that automatically uses all screen real estate, regardless of resolution or aspect ratio, is looking smarter by the day.

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For Android it wasn't smarter, because they allowed any screen size and dimensions it was absolute necessity.

Which is why Apple introduced Auto layout in the iOS 6 SDK.

I don't really see this as a problem. Old apps still work just as will as they always did, and now you can also support a single larger screen size. If they wre goign to proliferate further. 3, 4 or more screen dimensions (in pixels) yes I'd say that's a problem, but two, especialy since one dimension is still exactly the same?. No, not a problem.

What I do wonder is how apps that support the larger screen size work on an iPad. Presumably they only run in small/older screen mode, scaled?

I think "pixel perfect" refers to matching a designer's visual design. iOS developers should have been using the layout constraints for most of the UI - if they have hardcoded values, then that is bad programming.

For apps that use a lot of UI graphics in the form of images, yes they have work to do. But the same would be true on Android.

It is still pixel perfect. Graphics is not up-sampled because it is still the same Retina tech, and black bars are mere inconvenience, I don't think it will be anywhere near as bad as indeed old 1x graphics in 3gs->4 transition.

As for android team, Google's YouTube app on Google's Nexus 7 device with Google's Android OS, when launched in portrait, goes to landscape _automatically_ and takes button controls like back button from the bottom of the screen to the side. I truly believe that technology is there, but apparently nobody gives a flying fuck about it.

>For me, the biggest issue with the new 16:9 screen is that the entire iOS app ecosystem has been built upon the idea of 'pixel perfection,' and this historical focus on pixel-perfect design has now put iOS developers in the position of having to modify their apps to support a growing variety of specific screen resolutions.

All iPhone apps already have to resize vertically. The status bar changes height when you're in a call.

How is that working exactly? If you are using custom graphics it needs to be stretched to fit a larger screen, or letter boxed to keep it's original ratio. If you are using nothing by standard UI elements it will adapt to the screen.

First there's a good set of flexible layout controls to build ui that'll position / size elements to the available screen real estate. So you can build screens that position elements fairly well on different resolutions.

Second you can make multiple versions of these layouts that'll swap in given some device parameters. So if the flexible layouts didn't suit your need you could make (for example) one for tablets, one for phones. You can do the same for bitmaps so you can have different versions of each for different DPIs.

For bitmap aspect ratio issues there are also 9patch bitmaps which specify which portions of the image can be stretched and which can't. That works pretty well for small adjustments and background images.

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