I am trying to calculate the physical size of a shape (diameter of a circle) on an iPod touch.
According to the apple website, the screen size is 4" and the aspect ratio is 16/9. Using pythagoras and taking into account the relative size (CG points). I should be able to calculate the physical dot size.
However it always seems to be just a tiny bit out. E.g. instead of a dot size of 1" according to my ruler it will be 1.1"
Unless I am making an incorrect assumption in above. I feel like the only source of error could be due to the constants: incorrect screen size, incorrect aspect ratio or rounding error
Stolen from wikipedia:
The display of the iPhone 4 is manufactured by LG under an exclusive contract with Apple. It features an LED backlit TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen with a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch (ppi) on a 3.5 in (8.9 cm) (diagonally measured), 960×640 display. Each pixel is 78 micrometers in width.
There could be many factors, pixel pitch or some other. Don't break it down from the device size. Instead use the size of the pixels, including any pitch between them and multiply up.
There's a library here you might find useful for different devices to get this information, I haven't used it but it looks recent and useful.
Related
I'm trying to programmatically adapt my website's image sizes for differently sized devices. But now I am having trouble telling what sizes I actually need. In Google Chrome emulator, I'm seeing some of my images upsized, e.g. on iPhone 6 from 230x230 natural to 357x357 displayed. The image takes up nearly the entire width of the emulated screen, and looks just slightly degraded, suggesting iPhone 6's width isn't much larger than 357 pixels.
But Apple says the iPhone 6 has a resolution of 750x1334! If that were true, the image should look much worse, I would think.
I've found some contradictory information on iPhone 4 as well.
This site talks about iPhone 4 at 640x960 pixels. Chrome emulator again shows it at half those dimensions, 320x480.
This stackoverflow question says that "the iPhone screen is 320x480 definitely."
What am I missing here? Why do some sources (including Apple) supply dimensions that are twice what Chrome emulator (and my images) say?
Relax, you're about to understand this mess. Just notice that 2 * 375x667 = 750x1334.
A pixel is not a pixel
The key thing is: one device pixel is different from one CSS pixel.
They are the same in low pixel density devices like your computer screen (96 dpi). However, high pixel density devices like smartphones and printers (upwards of 160 dpi) try to obey the general W3C CSS3 spec understanding that one CSS pixel should always be close to 1/96th of an inch (or 0.26 mm) when viewed from usual distance (arm's length).
They don't obey the spec to the letter, since that would imply 1px being exactly 1/96th of one real inch in high DPI settings, which wasn't ever implemented in any browser AFAIK. However, they try to make their CSS pixels not so minuscule despite very high pixel densities by making one CSS pixel equal to two or more device pixels.
Chrome Device Mode works with CSS pixels, which is what you should use to design text, navbars, headings etc, but not high-resolution images. For these, read the next section.
If you didn't notice, the image above shows that Chrome Device Mode does show you the device scale (how many device pixels equal one CSS pixel).
Fixing image resolution
As you already know, this affects images negatively, since the browser scales the image as well. Your 230x230 CSS pixels picture becomes 460x460 device pixels, using the same quality. To fix that, use the srcset attribute to give the browser links to different resolution files of the same image.
Example (adapted from the link above):
<img src="wolf-400.jpg" srcset="wolf-400.jpg 400w, wolf-800.jpg 800w, wolf-1600.jpg 1600w">
An iPhone 6 will look at that and think "oh, I pretend to be 375px wide but I'm actually 750px, so I'll download wolf-800.jpg."
Just don't forget to use src="" for compatibility. Also, unless you use sizes="", the browser will default to the full width of the device.
The apple guides haven't helped me too much with this but I am starting to get serious about IOS development and was taken aback when I saw images go from #1x to #3x.
One source I found said they were based on sizes. For example:
If you are working on an inferred VC size and your image is 30x30 and you run that on a iPhone6 then your image should be 30x30 for #3x, 20x20 for #2x, and 10x10 for #1x.
Another source I said mentioned that it was based off the images resolution and not the size of the image.
Could someone clear this up for me and explain how to make sure my images look professional for all screens?
Thanks in advance!
When the first iPhone (and SDK) came out, all images were 1x (1 pixel of the image = 1 pixel of the screen), because that's all we had to care about. On that phone there were 166 horizontal or vertical pixels per inch (dpi). So to display an image that stretched from the left edge to the right edge, our image would need to be 320 wide (because that's what Apple told us - we didn't have to count pixels) by whatever height we wanted. Let's say 100 pixels tall. We'd name that image MyPhoto.png (because Apple told us the iPhone OS worked best with PNG images) and we'd display it.
When the iPhone 4 came out with the retina display, its retina display had 2 times the horizontal and 2 times the vertical resolution of the older phones. So now we needed higher resolution images to get the best looking interface. We were still displaying just a 2" wide image, but it would need twice the number of horizontal pixels and twice the number of vertical pixels (4 times the total number of pixels) to fill the same space. So now our image needs to be 640 pixels by 200 pixels. Since our app would still need to support the older phones as well as the new phones, we didn't want to just replace the old image with the new one. We needed a way to support both. So the old images kept the same name they had before (we didn't append "#1x") and the new images got the "#2x" filename extension to indicate they were twice the resolution. So we'd name this larger image MyPhoto#2x.png.
A common question is why not use just the higher resolution images on both old and new phones? With scaling, both appear to work great. The problem primarily is that the iPhone, especially the older phones, had very limited memory to work with. Using images that are 4 times larger than they need to be is really hard on that limited memory. That's why we had to have both 1x and 2x images in our apps.
For our sanity, we would still just use 1x while designing the interfaces. So screens remained 320 pixels wide in our code, even if we were going to display them on a retina display that was 640 pixels wide. If we wanted to draw a 1 pixel wide line on the retinal display, we'd make it half a pixel wide in our code.
With the larger screen of the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple had to pack even more pixels on the screen to maintain the high resolution customers came to expect. So now we're into 3x images. However, the iPhone 6 Plus doesn't really have three times the number of horizontal or vertical pixels. But again Apple has kept us sane by just asking us to supply "#3x" images, and it worries about scaling them down a bit on the device. As before, we still need to support smaller screen resolutions too, so we still include "#2x" and the 1x images in our apps.
So, to continue our example, the #3x image would need to be three times the width and height of the 1x image. So now we need a 960 wide by 300 pixel tall image. We'd name it MyPhoto#3x.png.
Notice that although I mentioned earlier something about a 166 dpi display, that's not really important when creating these images. In your photo editing app you don't really care if the image is 166 or 72 dpi or anything else. The only important part is the number of pixels in width and height of the final image we export.
So to answer your question (hopefully), you'll want to include all three of these images in your iPhone compatible apps. You can skip the #3x image for iPad-only apps, because there's no 3x screen yet for the iPad. But continue to think only in the 1x size when working in Interface Builder and code.
For example, now to display a 1 pixel wide line on the iPhone 6 Plus, you'd draw a 0.33 wide line rather than a 1 point line. Of course, you still want to support all of the other screen resolutions too, so you'd use code like this to set your line width:
let lineWidth = 1.0 / UIScreen.mainScreen().scale
This will give you 1.0 for the non-retinal iPhones, 0.5 for the iPhone 4, 5 & 6, and 0.33 for the iPhone 6 Plus.
Well, I have basically two questions regarding screen resolution in iOS devices.
1) In iOS documentation, on the Point vs Pixels section, it states the coordinates are passed in to framework as points, and that "One point does not necessarily correspond to one pixel on the screen." as found here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/WindowsViews/Conceptual/ViewPG_iPhoneOS/WindowsandViews/WindowsandViews.html
When they are different? Up until now I was assuming they were equal and passing in pixel coordinates. Is this a parameter that changes from device to device?
2) I'm also a little bit confused about PPI. I know what it means on the hardware screen (if a 10" and a 7" display have the same pixel resolution then the 7" display will have a better image quality since the PPI is higher). But what difference it makes if I save a .png with 72ppi or 96 or even 326? Is it just for printing or does it make any difference visually on my screen?
Thanks
On retina devices (iPhone 4, 4S, or 5, and iPad 3 or 4), there are 2 pixels per point. On non-retina devices, there is 1 pixel per point.
Except for the iPhone 5, all iPhones have a screen size of 320x480 points. The retina iPhones have a screen size of 640x960 pixels (but the same point size as the non-retina devices).
When working with images in iOS, it is the pixel size that matters, not the PPI. Just remember that your #2x images should have twice the width and height of the regular, non-retina images.
Kind of a fun question. I am hoping that is generates a lot of good thinking.
I am in the design, early alpha stage of my current orthogonal game project. I am experimenting with different tile sizes. A few questions as I would like to step off on the right foot.
Should we differentiate tile size (80x80, 32x32 etc) on retina vs. non retina displays, iPhone vs iPad displays?
What is a good recommended tile size that accommodates both the designer and the artist... and why?
Goals:
I would like to a clean, crisp visuals no matter the display format. Cartoony, colorful 16bit to 32bit images no matter the display.
I would like to keep to a 1024x1024 texture size for my atlas. I am hoping this will give me enough tiles to make the world look good and not crush my tile map system.
My current map size is 200 tiles wide x 120 tiles high. The map will be a a low detail (nautically focused) mercator projection of Earth.
Thanks in advance for all the good advice.
E
I usually try to make my games for iPad screen aspect where I'm making sure that the important elements are in a smaller Safe Zone. And the UI can be anchored on specified distance from the edges. Then for iPhone screen aspect I crop a small portion of the screen and layout the UI accordingly.
So if you are working in landscape here are the sizes you need to support:
480x320 - iPhone (0.5)
960x640 - iPhone Retina (1)
1024x768 - iPad (1)
2048x1736 - iPad Retina (2)
The number in brackets indicate the scale. I just like picking iPad (1024x768) for my ingame units. At this point I have all textures in 3 sizes, since I'm using OpenGL I use different mipmaps for each resolution I need. My texture loading function can skip mipmap levels so that on devices that I don't need high res I safe memory and loading time.
Depends if you need to click on individual tiles. In case you need to I'll suggest using 64x64 on iPhone (480x320) 256x256 on iPad Retina (2048x1736). Having all your art in power of 2 is always good. If the size is too large then consider 48x48 for iPhone and 192x192 for iPad Retina. If your game requires you can have smaller tiles but consider having larger active zone around the entities that you have to click (hopefully not every tile will be clickable).
I faced a similar issue a while ago and realized I was tackling the problem from the wrong angle.
You first need to consider the average finger/thumb size of the user and determine how many pixels/points consume that space.
From there you can derive the non-Retina Display pixel units and Retina Display point units to use.
N.B. that a game that might play well on the iPad might not work on the iPhone if the user's fingers obscure the view.
When programming for the iPad, font (and other) sizes are specified in "points." I have seen reference to a point as a pixel that is independent of screen resolution. But I am having trouble finding definite confirmation of how big a point is in real terms (that is, in terms of inches). Is a point equal to one pixel on the standard iPad screen, so 1pt = 1/132in? And then, to confirm, this means that an "iOS point" is a different unit than the printer's point = 1/72in?
Thanks.
See here and here (scroll down to points vs. pixels) for the official word. Basically, a point is one pixel on a non-retina device (so the size varies between the iPad and the iPhone - it isn't related to a printer's point) and 2 pixels on a retina device (which has twice the number of pixels in each direction).
Drawing and positioning is done in points to allow the same code to run on both types of device - the frameworks will fill in the gaps to make drawing smoother on retina devices.
An iPad point is different to an iPhone point, which is different to a printers point, to answer your question.