Pinboard: bookmarks for InkyHarmonics tagged 'mobile'

Aspect Ratios

On one side of the aisle, this fall will bring a new iPhone
& iPad; on the other there’s a steady flow of Android handsets and tablets
and in-betweens.

One thing about the Apple mobile line had been puzzling me till recently:
There are only two form factors. The prognosticators think that
the next iPhone will be about the same size and shape as it is now. The same
is true of the iPad, except for maybe it’ll have a double-density “Retina”
display.

It couldn’t be more different on the Android side, with devices of
every size and shape imaginable, some of ’em real eye-rollers. Today, I
laughed at a
tweet from
Sascha Segan: “Samsung now has: 2.8 3.2 3.5 3.7 4 4.3 4.5 5 7 7.7 8.9 10.1
inch screen Androids. Where's the 6-incher Sammy? Get on the case!”
And Samsung is just one builder.

Theories of History
There are two possible explanations for this: First, Apple has ascertained
that the 3½-inch and 10-inch diagonals constitute the Platonic ideals for
screen size, and no others are worth building. Second, there are technical
barriers to exploring new iOS form factors.

For a long time, I didn’t believe either theory. So when in 2010 I fell in
love with the original Galaxy Tab,
largely on
account of its size, I
confidently
asserted “Apple will totally do a 7" device... This argument is
over”. Clearly I’m eating those words.

John Gruber asserted repeatedly
that a 7-inch (or other form factor)
device was not in the cards because it would screw up the screen layouts;
unless of course the new screen were an exact multiple of the number of pixels
on its predecessor, as with the iPhone 4’s Retina Display.

Since I work on a daily basis with at least four different screen sizes,
all of which are driven reliably by Apple software,
this claim baffled me. Then I noticed that none of the iOS
developers were pushing back; and also Gruber is always right when it comes to
Apple whys and wherefores. (But these days, bizarrely bent out of shape on
the subject of Google; every action is explained by some
implausible combination of malice,
hypocrisy, and intellectual-property knavery. Jeepers, John, unclench
a bit. But I digress.)

I still didn’t really understand the technical issue.

The Real Reason
The scales fell from my eyes when I read Nick Farina’s
An iOS Developer
Takes on Android, which to my mind is the single best piece of comparative
writing on this subject by anyone, anywhere. In particular, scroll down to
the “A Real Box Model” section. (Hey Nick, real men put hashtags on their
sections so people can link to them. That’s what hashtags are for, not the
horrible things that Twitter and other miscreants are doing with them. But I
digress.)

When I saw Nick’s sample iOS code, I initially shook my head in
disbelief at all the little bits of hard-coded arithmetic, like
y += 7 and MARGIN - 30. Clearly this logic is not
resilient in the face of a different-shaped screen. But I bet it’s fast.

It’s not done that way in Android-land.

Android Assumptions
Just about the first one is that you have to deal with variations in shape,
size, and density, but that you get lots of help from the framework.
Check out Dianne Hackborn’s monumental
New Tools For Managing Screen Sizes,
a comprehensive introduction to screen geometries and the mighty “dp” unit
that makes it all tractable. The repertoire of
Layouts
also helps, and is constantly being refreshed with things like
ViewPager;
which mostly Just Work in the face of any old set of screen
dimensions.

It’s plausible, as Nick Farina implies, that iOS’
fixed-dimensions screen model is partly responsible for the
astonishingly-fast performance Apple wrings out of the underlying hardware.

And I’m not even saying that Apple’s choice here is wrong. The trade-off,
if I understand it correctly, is
form-factor flexibility for performance and simplicity, and so far that’s been
working out pretty well for them.

I Seem To Have Been Wrong
About Apple doing a 7-inch device, I mean. But I’m sure as anything
that somebody is gonna sell a buttload of tablets at that
size. I’ve got probably as much experience as anyone in the world carrying
around large and small tablets simultaneously,
and if I had to pick just one, it wouldn’t be ten inches in any dimension.

Technology/Mobile Technology Mobile from google
september 2011 by InkyHarmonics

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