24 April 2006

The High DPI Transition

I suppose I'm pretty slow realizing this, but in reading Dave Hyatt's post "High DPI Web Sites" and then John Siracusa's excellent post "Declaration of resolution-independence" I finally realized what all this means for developers: one more expensive transition and lots of work for great graphic artists. Typically when you purchase your graphics you buy them at a given resolution. For an app icon you currently only have to purchase: 1 app icon at 16 x 16 pixels 1 app icon at 32 x 32 pixels 1 app icon at 48 x 48 pixels 1 app icon at 128 x 128 pixels Or for each toolbar icon you'll need: 1 toolbar icon at 32 x 32 pixels (NSToolbarSizeModeRegular) 1 toolbar icon at 24 x 24 pixels (NSToolbarSizeModeSmall) For each document icon you'll need: 1 app icon at 16 x 16 pixels 1 app icon at 32 x 32 pixels 1 app icon at 48 x 48 pixels 1 app icon at 128 x 128 pixels Now according to this document, "Icon Services in Tiger has been extended to support icons that are 256 x 256 pixel in size" so we really should add 1 more app icon size and 1 more doc icon size, but let's just say we're on a budget. The point is with icon design you typically pay per pixel size. To make you application look good on a high resolution screens you'll need to re-purchase either higher resolution versions of your icons, or purchase the full PDF or PSD versions which cost a LOT more than say the 32 x 32 version of the same graphic. For icon designers this could be quite the wind fall. :-) Just for fun: For those of you who don't have Quartz Debug installed here are some interesting screenshots taken from my MacBook Pro with Tiger 10.4.6 at different resolutions:

36 DPI
72 DPI (Normal)
144 DPI
216 DPI
As you can see, the text scales just fine, the graphics on the other hand, well, they could use some work. It would really be interesting to know if Apple considers 3x (or 216 DPI) the upper limit for high resolution displays.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is something that Microsoft have got nailed with WPF in Vista - a properly resolution independent interface, using mainly vectors. Apple are not doing anything like this yet, so I'm hoping that such a feature is added to Leopard, even though I can't see an immediate use for it.

Dejafu said...

Also, IIRC, Microsoft uses a Truetype font to generate the minimize / maximize / close icons. So they already scale properly in XP at low dpi's. (The app icons are a different story.)

I am rather surprised that Apple doesn't use higher resolution widgets.

Mitchell Scott said...

This is vewy vewy interesting?

Anonymous said...

very cool, especially if you see how it is managed in xp^^

Nathan Herring said...

Heck, Windows has had a basic form of this around forever, in the form of the "large fonts" setting. Originally, all it allowed was to change between a logical DPI of 96 ppi and 120 ppi. [In Windows XP, there's no such limitation: Start/Control Panel/Display/Settings/Advanced/General tab/DPI setting.] Unfortunately, most applications, including Windows Office '97, did not abide nicely by those settings by StretchBlting icons to their new size -- they interpreted the setting as purely a font size change rather than an indication to scale all controls accordingly.

I'm still waiting for a time that I can switch from 1024x768 to 4096x3072 with a "fixed size on screen" checkbox checked, and have the text and graphics all remain the same size, but just get substantially more clear. I still think the software side of this will be easier to accomplish than the hardware side of increasing pixel density (so I can do the aforementioned switch on my 15" PowerBook).