Granted, most iOS developers I know think the @2x thing feels like an atrocious kludge. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see it deprecated a few years from now.
The blog you link to points out that since the only problem is in the places where you depend on bitmapped graphics, since shapes, strokes, fills, and fonts scale up and down nicely. It calls out what seems like an obvious solution: "In an ideal world icons would come in vector graphic form. That isn’t the case on Android (the platform doesn’t support SVG, including in the browser, which is a huge deficiency), but it is still shocking that Apple, which usually takes the lead on such innovations, doesn’t use them for iOS, as had been widely speculated as a given before the iPhone OS was first released." That this is "ideal" is obvious, but is it "shocking" that Apple hasn't followed suit? If we can't temporarily assume they're not stupid, let me posit another possibility: they realize they magically turn all the world's Photoshop wizards into Illustrator wizards overnight. The Resolution Independence Guidelines for Mac (http:// developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserExperience/ Conceptual/HiDPIOverview/Introduction/Introduction.html ) do encourage creating your original assets as vector art, but that's as hard as they're pushing, for now anyways. --Chris On Jan 21, 10:00 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > Flexible layout managers are available everywhere, they are not what makes > Apple's position challenging. The real problem is pixel independence and the > fact that so far, they've been able to get away with using integer multiples > of resolutions. Unsurprisingly, they have already hit a wall and experts > seem to agree that doubling the iPad's resolution on both axes is not > technically feasible in 2011. > > Apple simply can't escape the fact that they will have to introduce > fractional increases in resolutions and densities, something that Android > decided to tackle since day one. > > Here is a great article giving more details about the whole thing, and > calling BS in particular on people who say that fractional increases will > produce crappy results (e.g. John Gruber): > > http://blog.yafla.com/Apples_Embarrassing_Predicament/ > > -- > Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
