3 ms·
Multiple icons have been in Android since the beginning, and Apple started doing the same thing. If you navigate up a folder from your link, you'll see they als
by MithrilTuxedo 8y ago
Multiple icons have been in Android since the beginning, and Apple started doing the same thing. If you navigate up a folder from your link, you'll see they also support dozens of languages in addition to devices of different sizes and pixel densities.
The resources are done like that so the system doesn't have to scale icons -- so you don't see fuzzy icons anywhere because they've been scaled by the CPU. See: https://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html https://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_suppor...
It's worth noting that the Android apps installed on your device don't typically include all those icons. There are usually a handful, if not dozens of APKs that are available for download for apps when you get them from the Play store. The gradle build tool makes it relatively trivial to produce multiple versions of the same app, based on display size, display density, target Android version, and architecture. I can have resources for three densities, three device sizes, two OS versions, and two architectures, and produce 36 APKs from my build.
Apple did a similar thing with Universal Binaries back in the day that could run on PowerPC and x86.
Apple OSX has had scaling icons for a while too. You can define your icon in SVG (Android/iOS support this now) which is infinitely scalable, but generally icons are actually multiple images and the system selects the most appropriate one: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/icons-and-images/app-icon/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
This is all for systems that support display scaling and multiple architectures. Windows is still catching up.
- int_19h 8y agoFWIW, I'd say that Win10 display scaling is better than macOS, since you can use non-integer scaling factors. Linux used to be better still, with arbitrary scaling; but recently I've noticed that Gnome has also adopted the macOS model, which is really annoying on some display sizes, mostly on laptops (e.g. on Thinkpad X1, 1x is too small, and 2x is too large). For Macs it's more viable because they control the hardware, but there are some specific scenarios where it doesn't help - I remember this was a major problem when trying to hook up a Mac Mini to a TV a few years ago. The main complaint here, though, isn't that there are multiple zoom levels of the same icon, but that it's shipped with the app, instead of being provided by the OS.
- Symbiote 8y agoKDE still supports fractional scaling. I don't know what would be required for Gnome to do the same.
- DavidNielsen 8y agoUpgrade to GNOME 3.32 which shipped fractional scaling https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.32/ https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.32/
- int_19h 8y agoSo far as I can tell, this is Wayland-only, and even then still considered experimental. Also, which non-rolling Linux distros have picked up 3.32 already? Ubuntu is supposed to ship 19.04 with it this April, but that's the closest one I can think of.