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I'm not sure I follow the "Retinal Display" name. Is this just branding on a 300dpi pixel resolution? Or is there something to do with multi-resolution support

by gbhn 16y ago

I'm not sure I follow the "Retinal Display" name. Is this just branding on a 300dpi pixel resolution? Or is there something to do with multi-resolution support for apps (those coded in the old resolution will still get up-converted text resolution, it sounded like).

ugh 16y ago
It’s just a name for a 300+ ppi display. At that resolution and at the distances you usually hold a phone from the eye you shouldn’t be able to discern individual pixels. That’s it. The app things seems obvious, would be a serious oversight if they didn’t do that.
- hboon 16y ago
  I wish it means this though - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Typical marketer move - steal the term from even more advanced tech to hype an incremental, quantitative advance on current tech.
alain94040 16y ago
Let this be a lesson in marketing to all of you... As geeks, we'd tend to say "New and improved screen resolution: 300 DPI!". Which doesn't mean anything to 99% of the general population. But "retinal display", withs its attached explanation, now that's really something. Words matter.
- raganwald 16y ago
  You see this all the time on everything from advertisements to infomercials. There are two simple templates for every feature you want to pitch: Problem First: Tired of text that looks like it was built out of lego blocks? iPhone 4.0 has a 300DPI Retinal Display, which is so sharp that the human eye cannot see individual dots on the screen. Feature First: iPhone 4.0 has a 300DPI Retinal Display, which means you will never see blocky pixels again: the display is so sharp that the human eye cannot see the dots. ... Tired of working around the clock on a cool new feature only to have customers ask you "So What?" These two feature pitch templates explain why customers should care, which means more sales for you! Or perhaps: Reg Braithwaite's "World Of Go" uses gestures instead of buttons, which means the entire screen can be devoted to the board, making it look like a Go board instead of like a Go program.
alttab 16y ago
All I saw was an opportunity for fragmentation. If a developer wanted to make an iPhone app that took advantage of the new resolution - he'd either be limited to the original iPhone resolution, or to only the consumers that had the iP4. In either case, I can't imagine games running their own UI would look better as the images are limited to their original resolution. Only the UIBuilder interfaces will look sharper. What about battery life?
- protomyth 16y ago
  the screen doubled on the x and y - not too hard for the developers - just have 2 version of your bitmaps or scale the higher rez down.
  - alttab 16y ago
    Two versions of the bitmaps - even scaling during run time - would increase the app image footprint by 4 as well. For a 10mb 3G download limit, making it that more difficult to fit the initial download in the small space they give you. Not to mention the high screen resolution doesn't give you 4 times the memory for native apps. This will work great for the web - but when initial size is a factor (along with video memory that is still shared with the OS - is there more video memory in this version?) this actually creates more of a limitation as you could reach the ceiling quicker with no more functionality - just higher res images. So two versions isn't likely - scaling down is time consuming, battery consuming, and a waste of space. For optimum distribution, you would need a 3G version, a 4G version, possibly an iPad (HD) version, and maybe even a lite version of all three. You now have six version on the App Store. One compromise is to make a 3G version and a 4G retina display version - of which would probably look ok on the iPad because it has 78% of the pixels. I've developed multiple graphical applications and games for the iPhone so my perspective comes only with experience. Textures were always a hardware/memory limitation (it also only accepts textures in the size of a power of 2 - meaning you will need a sprite sheet layer as well) which made development-for-delivery a little tricky. I didn't hear anything about more on-board memory so despite my fragmentation comment this actually doesn't help much. a 300x200 transparent PNG takes almost a meg of RAM.

by gbhn 16y ago

ugh 16y ago

It’s just a name for a 300+ ppi display. At that resolution and at the distances you usually hold a phone from the eye you shouldn’t be able to discern individual pixels. That’s it. The app things seems obvious, would be a serious oversight if they didn’t do that.

hboon 16y ago
I wish it means this though - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Typical marketer move - steal the term from even more advanced tech to hype an incremental, quantitative advance on current tech.

alain94040 16y ago

Let this be a lesson in marketing to all of you... As geeks, we'd tend to say "New and improved screen resolution: 300 DPI!". Which doesn't mean anything to 99% of the general population. But "retinal display", withs its attached explanation, now that's really something. Words matter.

raganwald 16y ago
You see this all the time on everything from advertisements to infomercials. There are two simple templates for every feature you want to pitch: Problem First: Tired of text that looks like it was built out of lego blocks? iPhone 4.0 has a 300DPI Retinal Display, which is so sharp that the human eye cannot see individual dots on the screen. Feature First: iPhone 4.0 has a 300DPI Retinal Display, which means you will never see blocky pixels again: the display is so sharp that the human eye cannot see the dots. ... Tired of working around the clock on a cool new feature only to have customers ask you "So What?" These two feature pitch templates explain why customers should care, which means more sales for you! Or perhaps: Reg Braithwaite's "World Of Go" uses gestures instead of buttons, which means the entire screen can be devoted to the board, making it look like a Go board instead of like a Go program.

alttab 16y ago

All I saw was an opportunity for fragmentation. If a developer wanted to make an iPhone app that took advantage of the new resolution - he'd either be limited to the original iPhone resolution, or to only the consumers that had the iP4. In either case, I can't imagine games running their own UI would look better as the images are limited to their original resolution. Only the UIBuilder interfaces will look sharper. What about battery life?

protomyth 16y ago
the screen doubled on the x and y - not too hard for the developers - just have 2 version of your bitmaps or scale the higher rez down.
- alttab 16y ago
  Two versions of the bitmaps - even scaling during run time - would increase the app image footprint by 4 as well. For a 10mb 3G download limit, making it that more difficult to fit the initial download in the small space they give you. Not to mention the high screen resolution doesn't give you 4 times the memory for native apps. This will work great for the web - but when initial size is a factor (along with video memory that is still shared with the OS - is there more video memory in this version?) this actually creates more of a limitation as you could reach the ceiling quicker with no more functionality - just higher res images. So two versions isn't likely - scaling down is time consuming, battery consuming, and a waste of space. For optimum distribution, you would need a 3G version, a 4G version, possibly an iPad (HD) version, and maybe even a lite version of all three. You now have six version on the App Store. One compromise is to make a 3G version and a 4G retina display version - of which would probably look ok on the iPad because it has 78% of the pixels. I've developed multiple graphical applications and games for the iPhone so my perspective comes only with experience. Textures were always a hardware/memory limitation (it also only accepts textures in the size of a power of 2 - meaning you will need a sprite sheet layer as well) which made development-for-delivery a little tricky. I didn't hear anything about more on-board memory so despite my fragmentation comment this actually doesn't help much. a 300x200 transparent PNG takes almost a meg of RAM.