General Question

cirrina's avatar

On the iPad, are third-party app elements scaled up by PERCENTAGE or by ABSOLUTE height/width?

Asked by cirrina (187points) March 8th, 2010

Clearly Apple has made new versions of its own apps for the bigger resolution of the iPad screen.

But most existing third-party iPhone apps will also work on iPad, so my question is whether those third-party apps will be scaled up simply by percentage (say, a menu bar that took up the top 10% of the iPhone screen will take up 10% of the iPad screen) or by absolute measurements (say, a menu bar that took up the top 200 pixels of the iPhone screen will take up the top 200 pixels of the iPad screen—so the main area, the content, of the app will be bigger on the iPad relative to its menu bar than it was on the iPhone). The latter sounds a lot more flexible and usable to me!

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3 Answers

andrew's avatar

I’m nearly positive, since the iPad is quadruple the resolution of an iPhone, that the pixels will just be doubled and smoothed.

cirrina's avatar

Damn, that’s what I was afraid of. :( That would make it way, way less usable than I as hoping for third-party apps.

(Unless developers start making iPad-specific versions of their apps, and that will just depend on how popular the thing is.)

rawrgrr's avatar

@cirrina “Unless developers start making iPad-specific versions of their apps” This is exactly what they are already doing. While we wait, we can use the apps we’ve already bought for our iPhone.

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