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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 t

by 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 alttab 16y ago

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.