Re: Adaptive images

On Jun 2, 2011, at 4:20 AM, Kornel Lesiński wrote:

> On Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:57:55 +0100, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> 
>>> What about when the user zooms in on the image with an iPhone 3G? Wouldn't the user want the sharper image then?
>> 
>> This rarely comes up. Usually the user is either looking at the site zoomed out, or panning around in true 1 to 1 size, or the site is designed to fit in one screen width without zooming in or out.
> 
> Being locked to 1:1 is my huge gripe with Flickr mobile website. On touchscreen phone I want and expect double-tap to usefully zoom in an image — that's how it should be. The status-quo is that it doesn't really work, but I think it's due to lack of easy way to implement it and the fact that sites are built using design patterns borrowed from keypad phone/desktop design.

It would be tricky to design a mobile photo app that works this way. You have to either preload the full resolution images, even when the users may only want to scan the smaller versions, or you need to initiate the load of full resolution on double-tap, which makes it impossible to give a properly responsive zoom experience. I am not sure offhand how I would design this.

> 
> There's similar use-case on desktop: I'd like 90dpi images to be replaced with 300dpi variants before print.

Seems to me this is best handled with a print stylesheet, though doing network I/O at print time would be a little unfortunate.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 2 June 2011 16:21:53 UTC