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I was actually shocked at how badly Apple handled Retina, and even more shocked and disappointed that Windows did it worse. Apple basically made everyone rewri

by merlish 13y ago

I was actually shocked at how badly Apple handled Retina, and even more shocked and disappointed that Windows did it worse. Apple basically made everyone rewrite their apps instead of doing something sane - though admittedly they never had real support for multi-dpi, so perhaps that's an at least understandable solution. Microsoft have always had support for changing the DPI in the operating system, but in Windows 8.1 instead of reusing that support and improving the code so that you don't need to log out and back in to change DPI they instead started doing Retina-style scaling - but far worse. High-DPI apps (edit: non-Metro, I should clarify) in Windows 8.1 actually don't look good on a low-DPI screen. (You need an e.g. Retina main screen and a standard external monitor to experience this.) Sure, they look a lot better than the pixelly stuff on the main screen, but instead of rendering at standard DPI Windows instead renders at high DPI and linearly scales down the resulting image in the window manager, resulting in text that looks strangely off because it has been rendered at high DPI with appropriate hinting and then scaled down. This is not to mention what happens when you have a program half on one monitor, half on the other... it's either tiny on one screen or humungous on the other. Retina at least does this beautifully.

pilif 13y ago
> Apple basically made everyone rewrite their apps instead of doing something sane - though admittedly they never had real support for multi-dpi, so perhaps that's an at least understandable solution. They did not make everyone rewrite their apps. The only apps that actually needed to change were the ones that were rendering text without using the Text rendering APIs of the OS (a small minority of apps). Everything else just worked totally fine. Yes, some icons might have been blurry, but functionality-wise everything was fine. This is in contrast to Windows where switching to HiDPI mode usually means cut-off texts, invisible buttons (pushed out of the dialogs they are in) and, as noted by the OP, sometimes a mish-mash of correct and incorrect rendering within the same window. You tell us you were shocked by how it was handled by Apple, so what would you have done differently? How would you have solved the issue in a way that requires even less work by app developers? Honest question. I really can't imagine a better solution than what Apple has done, but then again, the bulk of my knowledge is in databases, web servers, web applications and devops, so I'm sure I miss something that you can see. Hence I'm asking.

by merlish 13y ago

pilif 13y ago

> Apple basically made everyone rewrite their apps instead of doing something sane - though admittedly they never had real support for multi-dpi, so perhaps that's an at least understandable solution. They did not make everyone rewrite their apps. The only apps that actually needed to change were the ones that were rendering text without using the Text rendering APIs of the OS (a small minority of apps). Everything else just worked totally fine. Yes, some icons might have been blurry, but functionality-wise everything was fine. This is in contrast to Windows where switching to HiDPI mode usually means cut-off texts, invisible buttons (pushed out of the dialogs they are in) and, as noted by the OP, sometimes a mish-mash of correct and incorrect rendering within the same window. You tell us you were shocked by how it was handled by Apple, so what would you have done differently? How would you have solved the issue in a way that requires even less work by app developers? Honest question. I really can't imagine a better solution than what Apple has done, but then again, the bulk of my knowledge is in databases, web servers, web applications and devops, so I'm sure I miss something that you can see. Hence I'm asking.