How to accommodate for the iPhone 4 screen resolution?

Question

According to Apple, the iPhone 4 has a new and better screen resolution:

3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display
960-by-640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi

This little detail affects our apps in a heavy way. Most of the demo apps on the net have one thing in common: They position views in the believe that the screen has a fixed size of 320 x 480 pixels. So what most (if not all) developers do is: they designed everything in such a way, that a touchable area is (for example) 50 x 50 pixels big. Just enough to tap it. Things have been positioned relative to the upper left, to reach a specific position on screen - let's say the center, or somewhere at the bottom.

When we develop high-resolution apps, they probably won't work on older devices. And if they do, they would suffer a lot from 4-times the size of any image, having to scale them down in memory.

Answer 1

According to Supporting High-Resolution Screens In Views, from the Apple docs:

On devices with high-resolution screens, the imageNamed:, imageWithContentsOfFile:, and initWithContentsOfFile: methods automatically looks for a version of the requested image with the @2x modifier in its name. It if finds one, it loads that image instead. If you do not provide a high-resolution version of a given image, the image object still loads a standard-resolution image (if one exists) and scales it during drawing.

When it loads an image, a UIImage object automatically sets the size and scale properties to appropriate values based on the suffix of the image file. For standard resolution images, it sets the scale property to 1.0 and sets the size of the image to the image’s pixel dimensions. For images with the @2x suffix in the filename, it sets the scale property to 2.0 and halves the width and height values to compensate for the scale factor. These halved values correlate correctly to the point-based dimensions you need to use in the logical coordinate space to render the image.

Answer 2

This is purely speculation, but if the resolution really is 960 x 640 - that's exactly twice as high a resolution as the current version. It would be trivially simple for the iPhone to check the apps build target and detect a legacy version of the app and simply scale it by 2. You'd never notice the difference.

Answer 3

Engadget's reporting of the keynote included the following transcript from Steve Jobs

...It makes it so your apps run automatically on this, but it renders your text and controls in the higher resolution. Your apps look even better, but if you do a little bit of work, then they will look stunning. So we suggest that you do that

So I infer from that, if you use existing APIs your app will get scaled up. If you take advantage of new iOS4 APIs, you can get all groovy with the new pixels.

Answer 4

It sounds like the display will be ok but I'm concerned about the logic in my game. Will touchesBegan positions return points in the new resolution? The screen bounds will be different, these types of things could potentially be problems for me.

Answer 5

Scaling to a double resolution for display purpose is straight forward, but will this scalling apply to all api's that input/output a screen coordinate? If not things are going to break aren't they?

Fair enough if it's been handled extensively throughout the framework.. I would imagine there are a lot of potential api's this effects.

Answer 6

For people who are coming to this thread looking for a solution to a mobile web interface, check out this post on the Webkit blog: http://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/

It seems that Webkit has solved this problem four years ago.

Answer 7

Yes it is true.

According to WWDC it appears that apple has build it some form of automatic conversion so that the resolution for applications will not be completely off. Think up-convert for dvd to HDTV's.

My guess would be that apple knows what most of the standards developers have been using and will already be using these for an immediate conversion. Of course if you are programming an application to take advantage of the new resolution it will look much nicer than whatever the result of apples auto-conversion is.

Answer 8

All of your labels and system buttons will be at 326dpi but your images will still be pixel doubled until you add the hi-res resources. I am currently updating my apps. If you build and run on the iPhone 4 sim then it is presented at 50%, go to Window > Scale > 100% to see the real difference! Labels are smooth, my images look shocking!