3 ms·

i do mean metro, mostly. aside from engine improvements microsoft has been really beating the drum with 3rd party developers to support high ppi screens out of

by trotsky 14y ago

i do mean metro, mostly. aside from engine improvements microsoft has been really beating the drum with 3rd party developers to support high ppi screens out of the gate. booting the retina mbp on windows 8 works surprisingly from the start, i have it installed with bootcamp. A lot more detail about the mbp and 8: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tonyschr/archive/2012/08/29/windows-8-on-macbook-pro-with-retina-display.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tonyschr/archive/2012/08/29/windows-...

zokier 14y ago
MS has been trying to get 3rd party developers make resolution independent apps for very long time now. Last time it was WPF that was supposed to solve all problems, now it's Metro. eg here is one blog post from 2006, which in turn refers to guide written in 2001 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/greg_schechter/archive/2006/08/07/690704.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/greg_schechter/archive/2006/08/07/69... iirc there was some similar blog-post series about high dpi stuff when windows 7 was released, but I couldn't find it now with google.
- trotsky 14y ago
  It seems more baked in this time, with metro automatically engaging two different scaling targets (full hd and 2560x) as well as the baseline ~100dpi. So people will be in hidpi modes without engaging them, and a good number of them since 10" full hd is looking like a high volume form factor. All of the ui elements are vector, fonts obviously are, and there is built in support for switching out bitmaps for the 3 stated targets - even in css from the internet. Visual Studio 2012 has these dpis built in to its ui builder previewer along with the typical form factor previews. I guess time will tell but it certainly feels like the most credible attempt to date to me.
- Moto7451 14y ago
  WPF and Metro are of course both XAML so the same push from the WPF days applies. I've build apps in Silverlight and WPF that scaled just fine. You just need to make sure you start with proportional design and stay that way, using some key min and max height/width properties where necessary. Most desktop app devs are used to fixed sized gui widgets which is where the problems start. Once you get into a proportional mindset, the hardest problems tend to be related to text and images. One trick I learned for the latter was using vector art as much as possible and converting SVG images to XAML (care of XamlExport[1]). Then scaling no longer becomes an issue. For raster art, I would hope Metro has something similar to iOS's retina graphic substitution magic. Silverlight 4 didn't which was a bit of a drag. Text was always a little trickier but when dealing with full screen apps I would usually just have some code that changed the text size based on the delta between the new and old window size. [1] http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/ http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Vector art doesn't scale very well. Most icons are designed in Illustrator (as vector art) and then touched up in Photoshop for each scaling used (as pixel art), mainly because the real time rendering of vector art just isn't at professional quality yet. So the only solution, which has been adopted by iOS and Metro (and probably Android) is to include multiple icons for each DPI class.
    - Moto7451 14y ago
      In my experience with converting to XAML you don't experience the same degradation since your art is being actively redrawn. You can add gradient brushes and other embellishments that scale well. Perhaps I will dust off my windows laptop and do a blog post about it. That said, you mentioned that Metro will do image substitution a la iOS. Thats fantastic and something I sorely missed during my Silverlight dev days.

by trotsky 14y ago

zokier 14y ago

MS has been trying to get 3rd party developers make resolution independent apps for very long time now. Last time it was WPF that was supposed to solve all problems, now it's Metro. eg here is one blog post from 2006, which in turn refers to guide written in 2001 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/greg_schechter/archive/2006/08/07/690704.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/greg_schechter/archive/2006/08/07/69... iirc there was some similar blog-post series about high dpi stuff when windows 7 was released, but I couldn't find it now with google.

trotsky 14y ago
It seems more baked in this time, with metro automatically engaging two different scaling targets (full hd and 2560x) as well as the baseline ~100dpi. So people will be in hidpi modes without engaging them, and a good number of them since 10" full hd is looking like a high volume form factor. All of the ui elements are vector, fonts obviously are, and there is built in support for switching out bitmaps for the 3 stated targets - even in css from the internet. Visual Studio 2012 has these dpis built in to its ui builder previewer along with the typical form factor previews. I guess time will tell but it certainly feels like the most credible attempt to date to me.
Moto7451 14y ago
WPF and Metro are of course both XAML so the same push from the WPF days applies. I've build apps in Silverlight and WPF that scaled just fine. You just need to make sure you start with proportional design and stay that way, using some key min and max height/width properties where necessary. Most desktop app devs are used to fixed sized gui widgets which is where the problems start. Once you get into a proportional mindset, the hardest problems tend to be related to text and images. One trick I learned for the latter was using vector art as much as possible and converting SVG images to XAML (care of XamlExport[1]). Then scaling no longer becomes an issue. For raster art, I would hope Metro has something similar to iOS's retina graphic substitution magic. Silverlight 4 didn't which was a bit of a drag. Text was always a little trickier but when dealing with full screen apps I would usually just have some code that changed the text size based on the delta between the new and old window size. [1] http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/ http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Vector art doesn't scale very well. Most icons are designed in Illustrator (as vector art) and then touched up in Photoshop for each scaling used (as pixel art), mainly because the real time rendering of vector art just isn't at professional quality yet. So the only solution, which has been adopted by iOS and Metro (and probably Android) is to include multiple icons for each DPI class.
  - Moto7451 14y ago
    In my experience with converting to XAML you don't experience the same degradation since your art is being actively redrawn. You can add gradient brushes and other embellishments that scale well. Perhaps I will dust off my windows laptop and do a blog post about it. That said, you mentioned that Metro will do image substitution a la iOS. Thats fantastic and something I sorely missed during my Silverlight dev days.