Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
But the thing is, that iOS is relatively locked into specific resolutions, rather than sizes. For a while, iphone apps on iPad really sucked because they launched at their native resolution.
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Again, it isn't just a question of resolution, but of physical size.
Most iPhone apps support both original and retina resolutions. Same for most iPad apps.
The iPad 3 has twice the horizontal and vertical resolution of the iPad 1/2, but you don't want all the UI elements to display at half the size.
The iPhone4 retina display was close in resolution to the iPad 1/2, but as you say just scaling up to the different physical size would have produced a very poor UI layout with gigantic buttons.
You design the UI first around how how large you want UI elements to actually be, and where they should be laid out, then worry about the resolution.
It would be very easy to make a smaller iPad with 1024x768 resolution, and iPad apps would run without any modification. But that would result in exactly what Jobs so famously derided, a UI that wasn't usable by people with normal size fingers, as everything would have been scaled down in size.
If Apple do release a smaller model iPad, they will redesign the UI to work well with the new screen size. That would mean three different physical sizes for developers to support, rather than two as currently. (Each of which has two resolution options, but that is much easier to support.)