So Android allows for the UI of its OS to be optimized for various screen resolutions and aspect ratios. How about apps? Do they share a common link between the OS and themselves for this resolution optimization? I'm curious in terms of tablets. If you have a 800x480 screen in 16:9. The OS's UI looks great but what about those apps? Is it strictly on an app to app basis how they will be presented? Hope the question is clear.
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Apps and SCreen Resolutions
- Thread starter zahne
- Start date
I am worried about this as well....one of the reasons there are lots of good apps and games for iPhone is that developers KNOW that if they make it for one, it works on all. With Android, a dev has to take into account all sorts of screens, button configs, etc. That takes time (= money) so fewer devs will work on Android I think.
btw I made a post about Android and filmmaking: Top 5: Android and iPad for Filmmakers Ernie Zahn
KlaymenDK
Android Expert
The canonical response is that, if an app were to suddenly find itself on a differently-sized screen, the app's UI would (should!) adapt to the new display boundaries by stretching (or compressing) each UI element in zero, one, or two dimensions.
This is because of how layouting is managed similar to the "box model" from html/css; every UI element is contained within a rectangle that is anchored in some way in relation to its surroundings, and furthermore may have a fixed size or may be allowed to expand to fill whatever room it is given. You see how this should quite automatically scale the UI to make the best use of the actual screen real estate.
The only real problems would be for custom-drawn UI elements. Buttons with icons and similar graphics should be okay up to a certain point as long as they use the neat nine-patch stretchable images (but only up to a certain point, eventually you will end up with an unreasonably tiny icon on a huge button). The real concern would be for games because they are fundamentally hand-drawn and can exhibit flaky scaling behaviour. Obviously, at some point you'd also expect the UI to change, for instance by showing more of everything -- three menu buttons plus a "more" submenu would seem daft on a screen that could easily support 20 buttons side by side.
On a side note, and a complicating matter, is that you're not supposed to think in actual "pixels". They've come up with the term "DIP", for device-independent pixel, which I guess is supposed to be similar to an "em" in html-speak, and which basically intends to work on a perceived relative size and becomes all the more confusing with non-uniform displays such as the Nexus One's PenTile matrix.
This is because of how layouting is managed similar to the "box model" from html/css; every UI element is contained within a rectangle that is anchored in some way in relation to its surroundings, and furthermore may have a fixed size or may be allowed to expand to fill whatever room it is given. You see how this should quite automatically scale the UI to make the best use of the actual screen real estate.
The only real problems would be for custom-drawn UI elements. Buttons with icons and similar graphics should be okay up to a certain point as long as they use the neat nine-patch stretchable images (but only up to a certain point, eventually you will end up with an unreasonably tiny icon on a huge button). The real concern would be for games because they are fundamentally hand-drawn and can exhibit flaky scaling behaviour. Obviously, at some point you'd also expect the UI to change, for instance by showing more of everything -- three menu buttons plus a "more" submenu would seem daft on a screen that could easily support 20 buttons side by side.
On a side note, and a complicating matter, is that you're not supposed to think in actual "pixels". They've come up with the term "DIP", for device-independent pixel, which I guess is supposed to be similar to an "em" in html-speak, and which basically intends to work on a perceived relative size and becomes all the more confusing with non-uniform displays such as the Nexus One's PenTile matrix.