Supporting High-Resolution Screens In Views

Apps built against iOS SDK 4.0 and later need to be prepared to run on devices with different screen resolutions. Fortunately, iOS makes supporting multiple screen resolutions easy. Most of the work of handling the different types of screens is done for you by the system frameworks. However, your app still needs to do some work to update raster-based images, and depending on your app you may want to do additional work to take advantage of the extra pixels available to you.

See Points Versus Pixels for important background information related to this topic.

Checklist for Supporting High-Resolution Screens

To update your apps for devices with high-resolution screens, you need to do the following:

Drawing Improvements That You Get for Free

The drawing technologies in iOS provide a lot of support to help you make your rendered content look good regardless of the resolution of the underlying screen:

If your app uses only native drawing technologies for its rendering, the only thing you need to do to support higher-resolution screens is provide high-resolution versions of your images.

Updating Your Image Resource Files

Apps running in iOS 4 should now include two separate files for each image resource. One file provides a standard-resolution version of a given image, and the second provides a high-resolution version of the same image. The naming conventions for each pair of image files is as follows:

The <ImageName> and <filename_extension> portions of each name specify the usual name and extension for the file. The <device_modifier> portion is optional and contains either the string ~ipad or ~iphone. You include one of these modifiers when you want to specify different versions of an image for iPad and iPhone. The inclusion of the @2x modifier for the high-resolution image is new and lets the system know that the image is the high-resolution variant of the standard image.

When creating high-resolution versions of your images, place the new versions in the same location in your app bundle as the original.

Loading Images into Your App

The UIImage class handles all of the work needed to load high-resolution images into your app. When creating new image objects, you use the same name to request both the standard and the high-resolution versions of your image. For example, if you have two image files, named Button.png and Button@2x.png, you would use the following code to request your button image:

UIImage *anImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"Button"];

On devices with high-resolution screens, the imageNamed:, imageWithContentsOfFile:, and initWithContentsOfFile: methods automatically looks for a version of the requested image with the @2x modifier in its name. If it finds one, it loads that image instead. If you do not provide a high-resolution version of a given image, the image object still loads a standard-resolution image (if one exists) and scales it during drawing.

When it loads an image, a UIImage object automatically sets the size and scale properties to appropriate values based on the suffix of the image file. For standard resolution images, it sets the scale property to 1.0 and sets the size of the image to the image’s pixel dimensions. For images with the @2x suffix in the filename, it sets the scale property to 2.0 and halves the width and height values to compensate for the scale factor. These halved values correlate correctly to the point-based dimensions you need to use in the logical coordinate space to render the image.

A UIImage object automatically takes its scale factor into account during drawing. Thus, any code you have for rendering images should work the same as long as you provide the correct image resources in your app bundle.

Using an Image View to Display Multiple Images

If your app uses the UIImageView class to present multiple images for a highlight or animation, all of the images you assign to that view must use the same scale factor. You can use an image view to display a single image or to animate several images, and you can also provide a highlight image. Therefore, if you provide high-resolution versions for one of these images, then all must have high-resolution versions as well.

Updating Your App’s Icons and Launch Images

In addition to updating your app’s custom image resources, you should also provide new high-resolution icons for your app’s icon and launch images. The process for updating these image resources is the same as for all other image resources. Create a new version of the image, add the @2x modifier string to the corresponding image filename, and treat the image as you do the original. For example, for app icons, add the high-resolution image filename to the CFBundleIconFiles key of your app’s Info.plist file.

For information about specifying the icons and launch images for your app, see App-Related Resources in App Programming Guide for iOS.

Drawing High-Resolution Content Using OpenGL ES or GLKit

If your app uses OpenGL ES or GLKit for rendering, your existing drawing code should continue to work without any changes. When drawn on a high-resolution screen, though, your content is scaled accordingly and will appear more blocky. The reason for the blocky appearance is that the default behavior of the CAEAGLLayer class, which you use to back your OpenGL ES renderbuffers (directly or indirectly), is the same as other Core Animation layer objects. In other words, its scale factor is set to 1.0 initially, which causes the Core Animation compositor to scale the contents of the layer on high-resolution screens. To avoid this blocky appearance, you need to increase the size of your OpenGL ES renderbuffers to match the size of the screen. (With more pixels, you can then increase the amount of detail you provide for your content.) Because adding more pixels to your renderbuffers has performance implications, though, you must explicitly opt in to support high-resolution screens.

To enable high-resolution drawing, you must change the scale factor of the view you use to present your OpenGL ES or GLKit content. Changing the contentScaleFactor property of your view from 1.0 to 2.0 triggers a matching change to the scale factor of the underlying CAEAGLLayer object. The renderbufferStorage:fromDrawable: method, which you use to bind the layer object to your renderbuffers, calculates the size of the render buffer by multiplying the layer’s bounds by its scale factor. Thus, doubling the scale factor doubles the width and height of the resulting render buffer, giving you more pixels for your content. After that, it is up to you to provide the content for those additional pixels.

Listing B-1 shows the proper way to bind your layer object to your renderbuffers and retrieve the resulting size information. If you used the OpenGL ES app template to create your code, then this step is already done for you, and the only thing you need to do is set the scale factor of your view appropriately. If you did not use the OpenGL ES app template, you should use code similar to this to retrieve the render buffer size. You should never assume that the render buffer size is fixed for a given type of device.

Listing B-1  Initializing a render buffer’s storage and retrieving its actual dimensions

GLuint colorRenderbuffer;
glGenRenderbuffersOES(1, &colorRenderbuffer);
glBindRenderbufferOES(GL_RENDERBUFFER_OES, colorRenderbuffer);
[myContext renderbufferStorage:GL_RENDERBUFFER_OES fromDrawable:myEAGLLayer];
 
// Get the renderbuffer size.
GLint width;
GLint height;
glGetRenderbufferParameterivOES(GL_RENDERBUFFER_OES, GL_RENDERBUFFER_WIDTH_OES, &width);
glGetRenderbufferParameterivOES(GL_RENDERBUFFER_OES, GL_RENDERBUFFER_HEIGHT_OES, &height);

If you do opt in to high-resolution drawing, you also need to adjust the model and texture assets of your app accordingly. For example, when running on iPad or on a high-resolution device, you might want to choose larger models and more detailed textures to take advantage of the increased number of pixels. Conversely, on a standard-resolution iPhone, you can continue to use smaller models and textures.

An important factor when determining whether to support high-resolution content is performance. The quadrupling of pixels that occurs when you change the scale factor of your layer from 1.0 to 2.0 puts additional pressure on the fragment processor. If your app performs many per-fragment calculations, the increase in pixels may reduce your app’s frame rate. If you find your app runs significantly slower at the higher scale factor, consider one of the following options:

The best solution depends on the needs of your OpenGL ES app; you should test more than one of these options and choose the approach that provides the best balance between performance and image quality.