Android does this. Even windows 7 has a configurable option for the size of all interface elements. (I recently got my mom a laptop with a small but very high resolution screen and was impressed with how well it handled it.) This article is a waste of space.
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Since everyone seems to agree with you I find it odd that more people aren't flagging this article. I've said it many times, please stop up-voting all the Apple articles. They don't belong here and nearly every one of them is discovered to be crap or inaccurate. Even after someone points it out and gets up-voted for it the article still remains on the front page. Exercise your ability to clean up HN -- flag!
You must be new here.
Standard reply here: If you don't like it, don't vote it up.
Also: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
I didn't vote it up nor did I tell anyone that I flagged it. I did break the rule that we should not attempt to coerce others into flagging an article. Thanks for pointing that out, but no thanks for the inflammatory "you must be new here." It's difficult to respect someone being snarky for no reason.
While I seem to have negligently exaggerated on the exclusivity of the iPhone 4's resolution independence, the spirit of the article is still there and the points are still valid. iOS's implementation of resolution independence is the best and most standardized implementation that exists.
Not really. I don't know how much you know about how it actually works, but it's a much bigger mess than what you are describing in the article. OS X isn't really built from the ground up to be resolution independent, and linking to articles about quartz is kind of misleading, given that a lot of the graphics layer of iOS is completely different than the graphics layer of Mac OS X.
It may be easier on OS X than other platforms, I don't really know, but Mac OS X, despite a lot of talk over the last 4 years or so, remains not fully resolution independent, and the new iOS approach is a pretty big departure from what has been going on in Mac OS X.
It's actually far harder on OS X than any modern Windows or Gnome system (don't know about KDE)
That's fine, but it doesn't save it from the fact that programmers and entrepreneurs don't need to be overly pre-occupied with information about Apple, its products, or its CEO all day long.
So you start with "Sure I was wrong", but then you head on to-
"iOS's implementation of resolution independence is the best and most standardized implementation that exists."
How do you know that? You don't even know that alternatives even exist, and here you're passing absolute judgment on them? Sorry, but you're woefully ill-equipped to make that statement.
You've said Windows 7 scales reasonably well, and I know from experience that Gnome does too. The real question is: why doesn't desktop OS X scale better?
For the past three major releases of OS X I've been hoping for a move to resolution-independent "fixed-size" interfaces. That is, the interface will take up the same physical size on any screen (unless you choose to zoom it in or out). What's holding them back?
Windows 7 does have some resolution independence, but it's very buggy and is very similar to desktop Mac OS X's sub-par implementation: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2008/09/13/follow-up-on-h...
iOS 4 is the first OS to be completely resolution-independent. Even Android's attempt at resolution independence is not widely supported well by Android apps.
Android's "attempt" at resolution independence? It's been designed for it from the start, and as a result it's very very simple to work with as a developer. Stop spreading FUD.
Any Android app by a competent developer will look great from one resolution to the next. Now the iPhone can do that too, just with some growing pains as developers update their apps to provide higher-definiton resources.
It's great that the iPhone is progressing, but there's no need to adopt this "finally Apple gets it right!" stance and trash their opponents who have been for years doing pretty much the same things you tout as revolutionary and unprecedented.
It's really hard to say that iOS 4 is resolution independent. Right now, it pretty much just supports two fixed resolutions. And though the public information is pretty limited, what we do know about the API approach suggests that each additional resolution is going to require a fair amount of manual effort to support out of the box.