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Todays displays have a quite huge range in size and resolution. For example, my 34.5cm × 19.5cm display (resulting in a diagonal of 39.6cm or 15.6") has 1366 × 768 pixels, whereas the MacBook Pro (3rd generation) with a 15" diagonal has 2880×1800 pixels.
Multiple people complained that everything is too small with such high resolution displays (see example). That is simple to explain when developers use pixels to define their GUI. For "traditional displays", this is not a big problem as the pixels might have about the same size on most monitors. But on the new monitors with much higher pixel density the pixels are simply smaller.
So how can / should user interface developers deal with that problem? Is it possible to get the physical size of the screen? Is it possible to set physical sizes instead of pixel-based ones? Is that still a problem (it's been a while since I last read about it) or was that fixed meanwhile?
(While css seems to support cm, when I try here it, it is not the set size).
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The first pitfall you must avoid is using pixels to define distances or sizes. Defining dimensions with pixels is a problem because different screens have different pixel densities, so the same number of pixels may correspond to different physical sizes on different devices.
In 4x screen (~640 DPI) it takes four times as many pixels (352 x 144 PX) to fill the area of 88 x 36 density-independent-pixels.
Density-independent pixels (dp) Density-independent pixels (pronounced “dips”) are flexible units that scale to uniform dimensions on any screen. When developing an Android application, use dp to display elements uniformly on screens with different densities.
Resolution is about how many pixels you can show on screen. Density is based on your device real size, if it's small and has a higher resolution, than the density is high cause you show more pixels in less physical space.
how can / should user interface developers deal with that problem?
Use a toolkit or framework that support resolution independence. WPF is built from the ground up to be resolution-independent, but even old framework like Windows Forms can learn new tricks. OSX/iOS and Windows (or browser if we're talking about web) itself may try to take care the problem by automatic scaling, but if there's bitmap graphic involved, developers might need to provide different bitmaps such in Android (which face most varying resolution and densities compared to other OS)
Is it possible to get the physical size of the screen?
No, and developers shouldn't care about it. Developers should only care about the class of the device (say, different UI for tablet and smartphone), and perhaps the DPI to decide which bitmap resource to use. Vector resource and font should be scaled by the framework.
Is that still a problem (it's been a while since I last read about it) or was that fixed meanwhile?
Depend on when you last read about it. Windows support is still spotty, even for the internal apps itself, and while anyone developing in WPF or UWP have it easy, don't expect major third party apps to join soon. OSX display scaling seems to work a bit better, while modern mobile OS are either running on limited range of resolution (iOS and Windows Phone) or handle every resolution imaginable quite nicely (Android)
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