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Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular
jones_supa writes "The Building Windows 8 blog comes up with a detailed post explaining the improved support of Windows 8 regarding different screen sizes, resolutions and pixel densities. Early on, the Windows team explored an inch-based scaling system, but found out that bitmaps would look blurry when scaled to unpredictable sizes. They ended up choosing three predefined scale percentages: 100%/140%/180%. The article goes on pondering the best solutions to make each app look good on different screens. Also shown: the distribution of resolutions being used today with Windows 7, 1366x768 having a huge lead at 42%."
Also known as the cheap laptop screen.
I hate this resolution. I seems to me that screen resolutions have gone backwards, it's nigh on impossible to do any development with this shitty resolution. My old 5 year old Dell laptop supports 1600x1200 compared to my more modern Acer laptop despite the Acer having a far more powerful graphics card. It's not even a native HD resolution so your graphics card has to scale the 720p image up to display it on fullscreen... which totally defeats the purpose of 720p as the scaling hardware is probably crap. It seems to me that laptop manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.
Please stop it with these 16:9 ratio displays. I can't stand having a two foot wide desktop with 6 inches of vertical height.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm still using a CRT with standard aspect ratio, and two spare CRTs/LCDs in the basement. I won't be going widescreen for awhile.
But an up-and-down resolution of only 768 would feel cramped to me. I'm used to 1024 pixels of room, so I can comfortably read documents and books (which are oriented vertically).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
No, the clue was that they tried to do an inch based resolution (like everyone else) but were still using bitmaps, which looked wrong. If they had used SVGs maybe we could finally get people on business desktops to stop setting their LCDs to the wrong resolution.
Before 1080p LCD's were commonplace, 1920x1200 screens were common. Now they're hard to find, and expensive and I really miss them. It's the perfect resolution for a desktop, allowing full HD playback with subtitles on the black bars, plus it's tall enough to have two pages of text fit nicely.
Once 1920x1080 LCDs started being mass produced and used in both monitors and TVs, the superior WUXGA screens became much harder to find.
I don't really get the whole 1366x768 screen. I'd rather have 1280x800, as it's to 720p as WUXGA is to 1080p.
16:10 all the way. Stupid TV industry has pushed computer monitors to use 16:9.
Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based. The code to support it has already been written over and over again. MSIE already supports the format from MSIE 8 and above. SVG does not have to mean the rendering is slow in the least and can easily mean bitmaps are rendered from SVG sources before displaying and only has to be updated if the screen resolution changes.
Of course, they could also have used WMF but... yeah... just no.
They could have selected any resolution after basing icons and other graphical bits on SVG and it would ALWAYS look as sharp as it needs to look.
Can i borrow your Lambo?
> When are we going to get an improvement in screen resolution ?!? And fuck the iPad3.
Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say "About 12-18 months after Apple releases a laptop with drastically improved screen resolution".
Fucking RMS cock sucking cum guzzler... I'll bet you were really holding yourself back not to say "Micros$oft".
Good grief.
He tried, but Hurd does not support the $ symbol yet.
There is a lot of thought being put into how to implement the support.
1080p is a thousand times more descriptive than UXWVGA or what have you, because it tells you both the vertical resolution and the fact that it's progressive scan (the 'p') as opposed to interlaced. TVs only come in a small number of aspect ratios (4:3 and 16:9), so the horizontal resolution is implied by the vertical.
And to boot, the "GA" part, which has alternately stood for "graphics adaptor" (eg. CGA == Color Graphics Adaptor) and "graphics array" (VGA == "Video Graphics Array"), is just stupid. That video card names somehow became a handle for resolutions is just silly, since originally, all these cards were capable of multiple resolutions. (Ok, the MDA wasn't, but then the MDA didn't end in 'GA' now did it?)
I guess this all happened around the time of the second wave of "SuperVGA" cards. The first wave did 800x600, and the newer ones could do 1024x768, and needed some way to distinguish themselves. Once XGA came along, the alphabet soup resolution plague was here to stay.
Program Intellivision!
Oh for god's sake. Are you trolling?
VGA = 640x480 ...
SVGA = 800x600
XGA = 1024x768
Go look it up for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_display_resolutions
It's not a marketing term as much as it is a name for a numeric expression indicating a rectangular range of pixels. Those terms have been around longer than 1080p (which just means 1080 progressive scan lines).
And to the commenter above mine "I wish all TV manufacturers would..." Why? While 1080p TVs normally mean 1920x1080p, the ONLY thing they are really guaranteeing is 1080 progressive scan lines. From the days of analog TV, the contents of each line has effectively been analog variations in signal. In the days before color, it was merely an analog variable signal indicating brightness. So there was no effective pixel width as you understand it today. The density of phosphor was as close as you could get early on and actual pixel count could only be approximated in early color displays. Only Sony's Trinitron display tubes could really claim a true horizontal pixel count in CRTs as the arrangement of color bits were more hexagonal (or triangular depending on how you looked at it) in nature. Of course today's digital TV sources do account for horizontal pixel count as well as vertical, but the habit of referring only to the vertical count comes from the analog scaling of the horizontal scan line which still exists in today's TVs and signals. Technically, if someone were to make a 1280x1080 display and made the horizontal pixels wide enough to create a 16x9 aspect ratio, they might still be able to call it "1080p" even though most assert that it should mean 1920x1080.
We're still living with some legacy standards in our "modern age."
Boxen is stupid enough, corporateboxen is truly something a douchenbaggen would say.
Just because it has been around for a while does not make it the best way. It's simpler to just give the numbers, like in 1920x1200.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It may be because of default font size, lack of desire to change resolutions, or maybe, here's a thought, THEIR MONITOR DOESN'T SUPPORT THAT REZ !
I apologize for my outburst, but a lot of people got monitors with their computers (straight from oem, no consumer choice involved) that doesn't have that vertical resolution as it only goes to 768, though it often has 1360 or 1366 horizontal resolution. And as to those of you with money to burn and can just get one of those huge and gorgeous monitors we all drool over, good for you, but the rest of us can't afford to buy another monitor, at least not this year, and definitely not for elitist reasons.
I wonder how many more times it will have to be spelled out to some of the posters on this forum that not everyone has the option of 1280 x 1024...
I saw a beautiful 24" 1900 x 1200 for only $200. I only had $70, and it was already reserved for important bills. God I hate being poor.
Windows has flawless high DPI support since Vista. It scales everything properly vector based to any level you like. You can try it on a system if you want, crank up the scaling and watch it go.
All MS apps do it as well. IE, Notepad, the calculator, all the things that come with windows properly listen to the size requests for them OS. Even thing like images, IE will upscale images properly. They don't gain resolution, of course, but they are the right size and the resampling algorithm is quite good.
The problem is apps. Some flat out don't listen, Steam is one of those, it just won't scale at all. Some want to do their own thing. FF is one of those, it can scale, but won't listen to Windows for scaling. However there worst is some scale some things. They'll scale their text (because they use the Windows text renderer) but not the boxes the text is in (because they use their own pixel based controls).
So that's the issue. Developers have to start following the spec. If they use the provided Windows controls, it is no problem they scale themselves. If they make their own also no problem, they just have to write in the scaling logic. Problem is they don't, they are lazy about it.
The graph on that page shows that in 1024x600 only "desktop apps" will be supported, not Metro, which will require a minimum of 1024x768. ....Which means that a large percentage of currentNetbooks won't be compatible with Win8/Metro.
Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based.
and a quote from the actual article...:
Windows 8, the platform natively supports vector graphics. Any images exported as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) or XAML art will scale without getting blurry.
No, the real idiots here are you and the wazzocks who rated you 'informative'...
This isn't about bitmap "images." It's about user interface elements. Few applications use images for icons unless, of course, we are talking about thumbnails which, interestingly enough, are scaled down images which works well enough without requiring every image come in multiple sizes.
I know too well what the limitations of both vector and bitmapped graphics are. But for user interface design, nothing beats vector graphics when keeping things future-proof. As Microsoft sets about saying "okay, here is the finite list of things Windows 8 supports" they are closing the door on flexibility, versatility and the future. They are, in effect, casting their vote in favor of backward compatibility over forward compatibility. And when you are planning to be relevant into the near future, it makes sense to care more about backware compatibility. But when you are planning to be relevant into the distant future... well... isn't it obvious to see how far Microsoft's vision extends?
I'm beginning to wonder if they just take a handful of high-value tiles from Scrabble, put them in a dice cup to shake 'em up, and then pull out letters until they get something unique. Perhaps not, or we'd have resolutions with Js and Ks in them. ;-)
Program Intellivision!
And I have a laptop from 2004 with a 17" 1920x1200 resolution LCD built-in. A replacement with similar resolution is nigh on impossible to find
The 17" Macbook Pro for a while now has had a 1920x1200 display. In fact all MacBooks eschew the HD fad and use a more realistic aspect ratio for display. You can even choose glossy or matte.
The system is due for an update later this year possibly to an ever higher DPI display...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd like to make a minor apology to the Ubuntu guys, yes your new UI sucks but compared to Win 8 its a God damned masterpiece. I thought for sure nothing could top the suck of Unity but now I have to give the Ubuntu devs credit, at least Unity is consistent and discoverable
And, if you still don't like it, easily replaceable: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
Win 8 is just a fucking mess. It TWO different UIs jarringly jammed together with no rhyme or reason
Something like the "At Ease" and "Finder" UIs of classic Mac OS?
Who the fuck thought have a touch designed UI as the MAIN UI on a NON TOUCH desktop or laptop was a smart idea?
Apple, in roughly 1993. But seriously, the Metro style start screen just replaces the start menu, and you're back to the desktop once you start a desktop application or close the start screen. My impression is that the biggest change compared to Windows 7, unless you install a bunch of Metro style applications from the Windows Store, is that the start menu is now full-screen instead of the bottom left corner.
Whooshen!
Anybody want a peanut?
No, you are wrong. It is Germanic. If you need something better then Wikipedia feel free to follow wiki's sources as these articles seem to be well sourced.
The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 300–400 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.[28] Up to that point, in Roman Britain the native population is assumed to have spoken the Celtic language Brythonic alongside the acrolectal influence of Latin, from the 400-year Roman occupation.[29]
Lexical similarity: 60% with German, 27% with French, 24% with Russian.
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.