about resolution independence...

[Colin Holgate]

On Mar 5, 2013, at 12:22 AM, Michael Mays <michael_livecode at nayyan.com> wrote:

> >If resolution independence is the ability within a particular ascpect 


I see there being three cases, two of which are naturally going to be taken care of, and one that I want to make sure that it's taken care of! The three cases are:

1. The aspect ratios you want to support vary enough that you need to lay out your application in different ways.
2. You have a fixed layout (or choose to have it be fixed), that you want to present through the shape of the device screen, either by filling in the extra areas with borders, or by cropping into your content.
3. The resolution of the device is different to the resolution of your document, and you want to have the document scale to fill the device.

I rarely use #1, and in LiveCode there are already several solutions to the problem.

Most of you see a good example of #2 and #3 every day, it's called "television". With television the broadcaster has an original scene that appears on screens which vary in resolution, size, and ratio. How the difference between the original scene and the user's screen is handled is either dictated by the TV station, or is under the user's control. For example, a regular 4:3 scene will slightly overfill an old TV, but on a widescreen TV there are either bars down the sides, or the top and bottom are cropped. A 16:9 movie will nicely fill a widescreen TV, and will either show bars above and below the scene on a regular TV, or will show a central section of the scene.

In all cases the TV picture can fill the screen, no matter how many pixels it has, and how big it is in size.

Film makers try to take care of the issue by making a 4:3 recording with a central 16:9 or wider area where the ideal composition is. Then it's possible to show the whole image to 4:3 viewers, rather than showing bars. The end result is that the viewer doesn't get the ideal composition, but the film maker knows up front what the viewer will see, and can even balance the composition so that at 2.35:1 it's pretty good, at 16:9 it's ideal, and at 4:3 it's tolerable!

I want LiveCode to have those same abilities.