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Air Display on the Third-Generation iPad
If you’re like us, you haven’t slept since March 16 because you’ve been enraptured by your new iPad with its stunning 264-DPI Retina screen. And you may have been wondering when Air Display will support the 2048x1536 resolution.
Performance Tuning
After Apple announced the new iPad on March 9, we worked like mad to add Retina resolution to Air Display. We got done in time, but of course we couldn’t ship the Air Display update until we had tested on a real iPad. Just in case.
It worked like a charm in the iPad simulator. Unfortunately when we got our new iPads and tested performance, we realized that the 4x increase in pixel count was killing our frame rates. So our engineers rushed back to the laboratory to experiment with codec settings, image filters, color spaces, threaded decompression, and god-knows-what-else.
Frame Rates
Finally we’ve got it working with good speed. What’s more, through all of this performance tuning and profiling, we’re delivering dramatically better frame rates on other devices as well. Especially the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, which have dual-core CPU like the new iPad.
Not only that, but this update will let you take advantage of Retina resolutions on iPhone 4 and 4S as well. And by the way, you can
HiDPI
So you will be able to use your new iPad as a 2048x1536 computer monitor. But that’s not all! On Mac OS X Lion or Mountain Lion, you’ll be able to turn on HiDPI mode. HiDPI is a hidden feature in Mac OS X that renders with double-resolution on a double-density screen.
Here’s what it looks like:
To turn on HiDPI, you just go to the Displays Preferences and select 1024x768 (HiDPI).
HiDPI has been shipping with Mac OS X for some time. But it isn’t enabled in the System Preferences, because until now there hasn’t been a mass-produced computer display with high enough pixel density (DPI) to do it justice. That’s where Air Display and the new iPad come in.
So, stay tuned. We need to wait through another Apple review cycle before this goes live but we think it’s going to be worth the wait.
UPDATE: Air Display 1.6 is live in the app store now. Response has been fantastic. It’s the #25 top-selling app in the iPad App Store today, ahead of Words with Friends and Angry Birds HD.
