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Comment by djfumberger | Hacker News Reader

All existing apps will be rendered into the current 320x568 frame buffer and scaled up. It's really no different to an iPhone app running on an iPad in that respect.

I'd imagine the scaled up apps will also look slightly blurry, but how much is to be seen once we get the devices.

A developer has to build the app under iOS 8 SDK with new launch images for the iPhone 6 and 6+ to use the native resolutions of those devices.

The frames will then be 375x667 and 414x736 for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+ respectively.

So the auto scaling is a stop gap, you really need to have the app running at the native resolutions to look as best they can.

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Is it definitely upscaling a 320x568 buffer, or is it fractionally scaling the UIView hierarchy to render at 375x667 or 414x736? My impression from the article was that it is doing the latter.

In the keynote they seemed to imply that existing apps would appear sharp on the new displays, and this sort of rendering trick would achieve that.

As far as I can see in the simulator it's definitely upscaling the 320x568 buffer.

I think the apps will look sharp because of a good scaler, not because it's messing with the UI View hierarchy.

I get the sense the author of the article isn't aware you need new launch images to make the app iPhone 6/6+ 'native' ?

Thanks — I was kind of excited to think that they had found a reliable way to upscale an arbitrary view hierarchy. I guess upscaling the compositor output is more reliable.

> All existing apps will be rendered into the current 320x568 frame buffer and scaled up. It's really no different to an iPhone app running on an iPad in that respect.

I don't think it quite works that way. In the past, your iPhone app was designed to run on iPhone only and it upscaled if you attempt to run it on iPad and the OS knew it had to do this due to a checkbox setting in xCode.

Nowadays, most apps are universal and runs on any device by adjust the output according to device resolution and given scale factor. Basically the scaling is handle internally by the program and not by the OS as described above. In theory, your app should be future proof if you did this correctly.

That said, you need HD Retina graphics so that your code avoids upscaling images. Beyond that, everything else such as fonts are not upscaled but drawn to scale.

Apparently launch images in different sizes will go away and will be replaced by storyboards with auto layout

http://oleb.net/blog/2014/08/replacing-launch-images-with-st...

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