

What iPhone 6 screen size means for developers - tfrank377
http://cleancrispcode.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/what-iphone-6-screen-size-means-for-developers/

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djfumberger
All existing apps will be rendered into the current 320x568 frame buffer and
scaled up. It's really no different to an iPhone app running on an iPad in
that respect.

I'd imagine the scaled up apps will also look slightly blurry, but how much is
to be seen once we get the devices.

A developer has to build the app under iOS 8 SDK with new launch images for
the iPhone 6 and 6+ to use the native resolutions of those devices.

The frames will then be 375x667 and 414x736 for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+
respectively.

So the auto scaling is a stop gap, you really need to have the app running at
the native resolutions to look as best they can.

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interpol_p
Is it definitely upscaling a 320x568 buffer, or is it fractionally scaling the
UIView hierarchy to render at 375x667 or 414x736? My impression from the
article was that it is doing the latter.

In the keynote they seemed to imply that existing apps would appear sharp on
the new displays, and this sort of rendering trick would achieve that.

~~~
djfumberger
As far as I can see in the simulator it's definitely upscaling the 320x568
buffer.

I think the apps will look sharp because of a good scaler, not because it's
messing with the UI View hierarchy.

I get the sense the author of the article isn't aware you need new launch
images to make the app iPhone 6/6+ 'native' ?

~~~
interpol_p
Thanks — I was kind of excited to think that they had found a reliable way to
upscale an arbitrary view hierarchy. I guess upscaling the compositor output
is more reliable.

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RyanZAG
Some "pixel perfect" iOS designers aren't going to like this, I think.

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kubazz
Game developers who need to be pixel perfect are already worried.

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interpol_p
This is really interesting, it means that non-iPhone 6 apps are tricked into
thinking they are rendering into a 320x568 logical buffer; but really a
fractional scaling is applied to the UI views so that things like text labels
and buttons render crisply into the larger resolution of the device without
the app needing to be updated at all.

~~~
gurkendoktor
This is not just a trick, it's a actually feature that the user can turn on
throughout the system, look for "Zoom View":

[http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/display/](http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/display/)

This is going to be great for older users :) But it begs the question if there
shouldn't be a similar feature on the iPad mini.

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jinushaun
It bothers me that we are still referencing iPhone 3 resolutions on 4 and
above. Eventually @2x will be the default and we need to stop bundling apps
with four versions of an image. Apple needs multi-targeted .ipa files. Why
does my iPhone need to download iPad assets?

~~~
interpol_p
We have moved to PDF assets for all of our apps. It's wonderful.

Generally we have a single illustrator file, some export scripts, and push the
resulting PDFs through ShrinkIt to minimise file size.

The result is tiny apps that handle all scale factors, can easily be tinted
programmatically, and generally match the aesthetic of iOS 7 and 8.

~~~
kalleboo
We're looking at moving to PDF when we adapt to fit the iPhone 6 Plus and I'd
be interested to hear if you guys ran into any snags along the way or if it
was all smooth sailing?

~~~
interpol_p
It's been very smooth for us. We use UIImage+PDF to load and cache assets. The
only issue is that you can't use PDFs directly in Xibs or Storyboards — you'll
have to load them in code.

I'd recommend creating all your assets on non-retina sized artboards in
Illustrator. We wrote a simple script to export all artboards to separate
PDFs, using the name of the artboard as the file name.

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rootinier
Good, related Stack Overflow discussion:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25755443/iphone-6-plus-
re...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25755443/iphone-6-plus-resolution-
confusion-xcode-or-apples-website)

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tfrank377
I made some updates to the article taking into account some of the feedback
mentioned here as well as quick way to "turn off" the scaling by adding launch
images.

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wnevets
does this mean iOS is a fragmented mess?

