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You are of course not truly alone, but you must be unusual. As an example, consider the upvote/downvote arrows on this site. They have very fuzzy boundaries o

by mturmon 14y ago

You are of course not truly alone, but you must be unusual. As an example, consider the upvote/downvote arrows on this site. They have very fuzzy boundaries on my laptop (128 ppi). It almost looks smudged. They are perfectly clear on my new iPad (264 ppi). This is not surprising, it's 2x the resolution in each direction.

ZeroGravitas 14y ago
It surprises me. The upvotes and downvotes are gif images, so all you're seeing is a blown up gif. I'm just in the process of replacing similar triangular gifs with near identical looking Unicode characters precisely so that it will look better on mobile devices that make more use of zoom. And in my experience (on iphone, iPad and Android phones and tablets, though admittedly not the new retina MBP) the current gifs look pretty bad when blown up. I think you've fallen for a placebo and somehow prefer the blurry resized images to the "pixel-perfect" originals.
- foxhill 14y ago
  you can include "hi-dpi" versions of images, which a retina-display device will search for, before searching for the original image, e.g upvote.gif will cause safari to check for upvote@2x.gif (or something like that - i can't remember the specifics) assuming HN follows this convention (and given the number of iOS/OS X users on here, i would be surprised if it didn't), then he will be receiving the high-resolution image, and hence it will look "pixel perfect".
  - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    Once again, I find myself surprised by someone's lack of surprise. Do you really think Hacker News uses hi-dpi images? My mind would be blown if it turned out it did. The HTML here is very old-school. Note also, that the zooming that is done on mobile browsers, and (as I understand it on most modes for the retina MBP) doesn't simply multiply by 2 like native apps on the iPad/Phone so even if you provided a double resolution image then it would be unlikely for it to be displayed "pixel perfect", but the increased resolution (in image and screen) would help to hide any resizing artefacts better. That's why using Unicode characters is a better idea, when possible, as they are vector and scale nicely, particularly so on high-dpi devices.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Why not just check? http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow@2x.gif http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow@2x.gif It doesn't.
- mturmon 14y ago
  If I could downvote myself, I would, because what I said is wrong. I was thinking about another site.

by mturmon 14y ago

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

It surprises me. The upvotes and downvotes are gif images, so all you're seeing is a blown up gif. I'm just in the process of replacing similar triangular gifs with near identical looking Unicode characters precisely so that it will look better on mobile devices that make more use of zoom. And in my experience (on iphone, iPad and Android phones and tablets, though admittedly not the new retina MBP) the current gifs look pretty bad when blown up. I think you've fallen for a placebo and somehow prefer the blurry resized images to the "pixel-perfect" originals.

foxhill 14y ago
you can include "hi-dpi" versions of images, which a retina-display device will search for, before searching for the original image, e.g upvote.gif will cause safari to check for upvote@2x.gif (or something like that - i can't remember the specifics) assuming HN follows this convention (and given the number of iOS/OS X users on here, i would be surprised if it didn't), then he will be receiving the high-resolution image, and hence it will look "pixel perfect".
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  Once again, I find myself surprised by someone's lack of surprise. Do you really think Hacker News uses hi-dpi images? My mind would be blown if it turned out it did. The HTML here is very old-school. Note also, that the zooming that is done on mobile browsers, and (as I understand it on most modes for the retina MBP) doesn't simply multiply by 2 like native apps on the iPad/Phone so even if you provided a double resolution image then it would be unlikely for it to be displayed "pixel perfect", but the increased resolution (in image and screen) would help to hide any resizing artefacts better. That's why using Unicode characters is a better idea, when possible, as they are vector and scale nicely, particularly so on high-dpi devices.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Why not just check? http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow@2x.gif http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow@2x.gif It doesn't.
mturmon 14y ago
If I could downvote myself, I would, because what I said is wrong. I was thinking about another site.