The Problem with a "Retina" Display on the iPad 2: Lack of Content

Update: This post was mentioned on Crunchgear and AppleInsider, and it seems many of the commenters didn't understand the point of the original post.

At this point I wish I'd never mentioned video in the post (or had relegated it to less than a paragraph).

My point was not that you won't be able to watch DVD resolution content on some future 7,680 x 4,320 pixel HD TV (1080p x 16) - the point was that additional resolution is only worth paying for if you're going to use it (and to answer the question of many commenters - yes, I have heard of upscaling video).

Of course user interface elements and text will look amazing on the super high-res iPad 2 (or iPad 3). But almost no content (forget about video for a second) is currently created with a 3 megapixel, 260 dpi display in mind. This is especially true of most graphics and photos used on the web. So, the home page of the New York Times will have print-quality text (in Safari for iPad 2) while all the rest of the graphics will be of much lower resolution and have to be upscaled (the main home page image is only 330 pixels wide). The effect will be a bit jarring. On the current iPhone 4 I can tell at a glance that an app hasn't been updated for the new retina display - the app icon even looks out of place on the home screen surrounded by high-res icons from other apps.

And yes, yes, I know that it's possible to use the web on a 30" monitor that has a resolution greater than this hypothetical iPad 2. But this works because a 27" iMac (for example) uses the additional pixels to create a physically larger display, not to increase the pixel density. Graphics that were designed on a 20" monitor and assumed a ~ 100 dpi display look fine on a 27" monitor - they are the same physical size on screen and are not pixel-doubled.

And what about iOS apps? I write offline travel apps for the iPhone, and because they don't require an internet connection, I include all the images in the app. The next update of my Prague guide will contain more than 10,000 images (at 300x200). Can I use these in a universal app that runs on an iPad 2? Sure, but the result won't be very satisfactory - blurry, massively upscaled images on the same screen as razor-sharp text and UI elements just won't look good. I'll be forced to include much higher resolution images in the app, and that will mean leaving most of the images out of the app entirely (I can't expect users to download a 5GB travel guide).

So, again, yes - I do understand the concept of upscaling. The point wasn't that you can't use the current web or a 2011 iOS app on the 2020 gigapixel 100" wall-mounted iPad 11. The point was that users are going to expect all the elements on screen to be of the same resolution, and that means the creation of a massive amount of new content (thus the "Lack of Content" part of my post title).

And did I mention that I understand the concept of upscaling video? Because I do.

The original post:

The iPad 2 will be announced soon, and thus there are a lot of rumors floating around as to the second-generation iPad's technical specs. Some of the new features are almost inevitable (front and rear cameras, more RAM) and some are less likely (SD card slot, new processor). But the real wildcard is the iPad 2's display. Both the iPod Touch and iPhone got 960x640 "retina" (i.e. more than 300dpi) displays in their latest versions, and there is a growing consensus on gadget blogs that the iPad 2 will have a similar "ultra high-res" display. Even John Gruber of Daring Fireball isn't dismissing the possibility of a 2048x1536 display on the iPad 2. We're talking about an iPad with nearly the resolution of a 30" desktop display.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that all of the usual problems with such a display have been solved (battery life, cost, speed, etc.). Even if the iPad 2 comes out in a 16GB WiFi version for $499 with a 2048x1536 display (four times the pixels of the original iPad, which is 1024x768), where is the content going to come from?

Take a look at the graphic I created showing the relative sizes of popular video formats in relation to this theoretical iPad 2 "retina" display. Forget about DVD (Standard Definition) video, which if displayed at native resolution would be little bigger than a postage stamp on this new display. 720p HD video (the highest resolution sold on iTunes) would fill only a quarter of the screen, and 1080p video would have black bars not only along the top and bottom, but also along the sides of the screen. Of course, Apple will scale up these videos to fill the screen, but most people don't expect pixel-doubling when watching HD video.

And what about on-line photos? Are web site owners now expected to post two or three megapixel photos on their sites to support Safari on iPad? Will the Photos application for iPad import full resolution photos when syncing to your computer? How big will games be if they fully support the 3,145,728 pixels of such a display?

I'm not arguing that Apple won't include such a display on the iPad 2, but if they do, I hope there's a 128GB version so that I can load more than one movie on it at a time (assuming a few apps, some photos, some music, and 1080p video, the 16GB version would hold about one 90 minute film).

I guess my next purchase is a RED camera to shoot home videos that will support the iPad 2's display.

Amsterdam City Center Complete

We've completed processing of our photos for the Amsterdam city center, and we now have over 2,000 (2,202 to be exact) verified listings on the site. You can see the listings in English, in Dutch, in German, in Czech, in Danish, in Polish, and a whole bunch of other languages.

We'll be releasing a new Amsterdam iPhone app based on these listings in the next few weeks (shame we couldn't get it out before Christmas).

And in case you were wondering - yes, we covered all the "coffee shops"¹.

---

¹ Why the double quotes? As Wikipedia will tell you, most people don't go to these places for the coffee.

Title Junk

John Gruber recently posted a long-ish item about the "Title Junk" that he finds on many websites.

The gist of the argument is that many sites knowingly or unknowingly use overly complex or just plain confusing page titles (e.g. "'2001' — the Monolith and the Message :: rogerebert.com :: News & Comment") for web pages, which then end up as the name of the link on bookmarking sites, in your browser history, etc. He suggests using much simpler and clearer titles to make life easier for users.

I'd have to agree that page titles are for the most part overly long, and often packed full of SEO keywords. So why do CMS systems and website designers insist on using these kinds of page titles? Because the real audience for these page titles is not the end user, but rather the GoogleBot.

According to Gruber, we webmasters shouldn't worry about this:

So make titles useful. Write them for humans, not search engine spiders. Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out.

While I agree with most of Gruber's article, I'm not sure I agree with this part. At Nelso, we try to keep the length of page titles to a minimum, but we do also try to make them useful for search engine crawlers. Some of the page titles are longer than we'd use if there was no such thing as a search crawler.

I have no special knowledge of the algorithm that Bing, Google, Yandex, Seznam, et al use to rank pages in the index, but it really seems to matter what one puts in page titles.

Take a look at a Google search for "Sushi Prague 6". The majority of the pages that appear in the top ten results for that search have all the keywords in the page title. One of the top results for that search, Mashhana Sushi House, has a title on our site of "Mashhana Sushi House - Prague 6, Czech Republic (Sushi, Japanese Cuisine, Korean Cuisine)". Sure, the title could be a lot shorter, but I'm not convinced that we'd rank so well if we shortened the page title to just the name of the business.

So, until we have evidence that page titles really don't matter to search engines, we'll continue to balance both the needs of users and search engines when creating page titles.

Nelso Brazil

We're very close to launching a new site for travelers from Brazil (we don't have any local search listings for Brazil) at Nelso.com.br.

This is an exciting opportunity for Nelso — Brazil has more internet users (about 72m) than Germany, and far more than the combined populations of Denmark and the Czech Republic (where we operate our most popular sites, Nelso.dk and Nelso.cz).

Even more encouraging, Brazilians have recently been increasing their spending on foreign tourism, including a 70% increase in spending on trips to the U.S. in just the last year.

Are you a Portuguese-speaking tourist headed to Amsterdam, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Barcelona, or hundreds of other cities? We've got you covered.

Nelso.lv (Latvia) making progress

There's been substantial progress made on Nelso.lv, and very soon we will be able to start properly promoting the site to Latvian speakers. Take a look at a list of the translated categories for Prague, Barcelona, and Stockholm. Even in this state I think it's a useful resource for the Latvian traveler.

UPDATE 8/12/2010: The core translation is now almost complete.

More than 1,300 verified Amsterdam business listings

We've been working on processing all the photos we took in Amsterdam in early October, and there are now more than 1,300 fully verified business listings on Nelso (and thousands more to come over the next few weeks). Of course, these are available in all the languages we support (for example, here's a list of Amsterdam restaurants in German).

As we now have most of the center well covered, we'll be issuing an iPhone app for Amsterdam soon.

UPDATE ON DECEMBER 8, 2010: We've now processed more than 2,000 verified listings for Amsterdam.

Latvian version of Nelso

We've launched a new site for Latvia (more by accident than by design) at Nelso.lv. The translation is only about 3% complete at this point, but we do have a list of Prague cafes in Latvian.

Amsterdam

We've got 50,000 photos of Amsterdam businesses in our queue. They'll take at least a few weeks to process, but when done should give us some of the best local search coverage of Amsterdam available on the web.

Inertial Navigation for the iPod Touch 4

The Apollo Guidance Computer used inertial navigation

Much to our disappointment (we're in the iOS offline travel guide business, after all), the new iPod Touch 4 does not come with built-in GPS.

It does have the ability (as the older iPods Touch did) to get a location using a WiFi signal. It also has a new feature (first launched in the iPhone 4) in that it contains a gyroscope. Along with the accelerometer, and WiFi as a way to input an initial position, we should now have all the tools required to build an (albeit crude) inertial navigation system for the iPod Touch 4 (some might call this "dead reckoning") . Has such a thing been built yet? I wish I had more free time - I wouldn't mind taking a crack at it myself.

Apple's Secret "Works Underwater" iOS API

Both my sons have an iPod Touch, and there's no better torture test for a consumer electronics device than to give one to a three-year-old and let him play with it. I think one of the reasons that small children are so destructive is that they don't understand the concept of money, and therefore don't fear breaking an expensive hand-held computer like an iPod Touch.

But my oldest son recently subjected his second-generation 8GB iPod Touch to the ultimate torture test - he tried to continue playing Angry Birds while diving to the bottom of a pool. When he came back up, and I realized he still had it in his hand, I took it away, dried it off with a towel, and watched the display distort (the way they portray a long-distance video call in movies) before it died. I set it on the shelf to let it dry out, thinking it was dead forever.

But after a week, I plugged in the power, turned it on, and it worked. Well, the WiFi no longer works, but other than that it seemed to be no worse for wear after its underwater expedition.

However, I found that the only apps that I could open were the apps supplied by Apple with iOS. No third-party apps would launch (they quit after the splash screen) - not even apps that don't use the WiFi connection. I don't see the WiFi as being the problem, because as you can see from the video below, even Apple-supplied apps that require WiFi (e.g. YouTube) launch without problems on this submarine iPod.

The answer to this mystery is obvious: Apple has a secret API in iOS that allows apps to work underwater. And why does this API exist? I can only assume that the Simpsons writers have inside info, and Steve Jobs really does run Apple from an underwater lair on the ocean floor.

I demand that Apple make this API public. We could then release an app that would cover not only the land portion of Australia, but could also be used by scuba divers while diving in the Great Barrier Reef (and the off-line function of our apps would be a big bonus here - GPS doesn't work underwater, and getting a cell signal underwater requires some serious equipment).



And speaking of iPods and iOS, Nelso has an ever-growing catalog of off-line travel apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can download our most recent app, an iPhone guide to Barcelona, for free from the App Store.