Friday, March 16, 2012

How Good is the Retina Display on the New iPad?

Mike Swanson, creator of the app Halftone has an answer … Halftone and the iPad Retina Display. Take a look at his blog post to see some screenshots comparing Retina versus non-retina displays.

The difference in quality is truly stunning.

For those who are curious, it didn’t take a lot of extra work to add full iPad Retina support to Halftone. Being a Universal app that also runs on iPhone and iPod touch, Halftone has long supported Retina resolution on the iPhone 4/4S. This meant that most of the icons and imagery in Halftone was already at Retina resolution.

Also, Halftone relies heavily on vector graphics for its borders, speech balloons, and stamps. As a result, it required no additional work for these elements to take full advantage of the new display. Another side-effect is that the additional memory in the new iPad also means that larger images can be processed and exported at full quality.

Finally, there’s legitimate concern that Retina-enabled iPad apps will result in much larger app sizes (and therefore require more bandwidth to download and store them on the device). In Halftone’s case, though, the increase is only around 1.5MB, and it’s due to the default screenshots that display when the app launches in portrait or landscape orientation. Otherwise, the vector imagery requires no additional space at all. Aren’t vectors great!?

No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...