And 10 years later still no proper support for retina displays. I really think you should get your priorities straight.
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It could be the priorities of these unpaid volunteers that you are not paying for do not align with yours. I’m sure they would invite you to contribute your improvements.
I'm sure they'd welcome your PR.
Snarky? No. It's open source. If it doesn't have feature <X> then you're free to add it. It can simultaneously be the most important feature for you, and entirely irrelevant to other contributors. You're not prevented from adding it, as you would be in a closed source product.
I'm sure you know all that but it bears refreshing. This is software that's free to use and free to modify. If you've an itch then you're at liberty to scratch it - just as other contributors are equally at liberty not to.
There is a GTK3 backend now, hopefully that should make HiDPI work, support Wayland, etc. – depending on how it's implemented of course.
Doesn't look like it's ready to handle all the UI (?) though – in the promo screenshot there's one GTK window on top of a more classic Pharo window (?)
it doesn't yet support the whole IDE (because it has some other complications, we will solve in next release), but it supports application development with it.
Cool. How does it work, is it 100% native widgets? Are there any platform specific (x11 etc.) things used?
it works everywhere gtk3 works (we have production applications in windows, macOS and obviously linux)
Because GTK3 is so great on Linux, we should run it on macOS and Windows too...
I don't know what they were thinking. As far as I can tell, Pharo UI history has been one bad (as in not pragmatic) decision after another.
It's the MVP of native GUIs. Should a purely-Win32-based UI arrive later, the additional work would at least be validated and trailblazed by the first Gtk implementation. You can't expect a small set of people do everything at once just because you want them to.
> I really think you should get your priorities straight.
The irony.
Pharo handles the Retina display on my new MacBook Pro just fine.
Retina displays don't matter because the majority of your users don't have them. Problem solved :)
Actually they do. A relatively cheap 13" laptop with a Full-HD screen is already considered HighDPI by Windows 10, where it uses a default of 125% scaling (or maybe 150%, not sure). Applications not supporting HighDPI (aka Retina) properly will likely have a relatively bad appearance (blurry icons, possibly blurry fonts, etc.). Even some integrated Windows features (hardware manager, to name one) have this problem... :-(
Blurry is one thing, I get teeny tiny mouse cursors too that I just can't find half the time. Incredibly annoying, especially when it's inconsistent within the same application.
Surely most decent laptops being sold are HiDPI at this point?
There isn't a proper definition for HiDPI. Displays used to be around 100ppi.
Nowdays, the majority of notebooks - even cheap ones - feature a FullHD display.
For example when i list all notebooks on gh.de and limit the maximum price to 600€ of the 599 listed laptops 389 of them have a pixel density of 150ppi or higher.
For a price up to 500€ it lists 306 laptops with 176 having 150+ppi.
But not real HiDPI. AFAIK Windows 10 just treats FullHD (1080p) as HiDPI and scales everything up to 125% by default but I always switch it back to 100% so I have reasonable screen space capacity. If the 13-inch displays were 4K that would be HiDPI.
Traditional (~110 DPI, what Windows and MacOS were designed for) 13" resolution is 1280 or 1366. So 200% that is merely 2560+
Ok, if it would be 2560 vertically on a 13" screen that's fair to consider it HiDPI but for 1280p on 15" this is questionable yet Windows does just this.I understand this is good for the vendors (who can claim they are selling you HiDPI - FullHD doesn't sound impressive enough anymore) and visually impaired people (that's actually great they are treated as the primary audience now). Perhaps this also is good as some sort of transition period so the technology gets introduced gradually while the screens still are not too dense and non-aware apps don't just become unusable instantly.
We're talking horizontal resolution. No need for "p" obfuscation from the TV world!
Ok, I thought we were talking about vertical an included the p specifically to disambiguate this. Practically 1080p just means 1920×1080 unambiguously (I know what does the p actually mean).
Traditionally we had 85-100ppi monitors for example
* 15 inches 1024x768 (85ppi)
* 17 inches 1280x1024 (96ppi)
* 19 inches 1400x1050 (92ppi)
I'd argue that everything that is beyond ~140ppi needs adjustments in software and could be considered HiDPI. You could also argue that 200% scaling should be the threshold, if we're starting with 85ppi that would be 170ppi.
It also depends on the viewer distance of course. Larger displays are usually viewed from a bigger distance.
Yes, for bigger distances this makes a lot of sense.
I want everything be as small as possible to fit more when I'm using my laptop but I would really appreciate decent unscaling on my RaspberryPi i use siting on the couch in about 3 meters from a 42-inch 1080p panel.
It all depends on who the user will be. Will it be a developer or will it be someone with a work laptop that has an 1366x768 screen?
Not as far as I'm aware, no.