"You need to scale things while they're rendered, and as long as you only do vector graphics like drawing lines and rectangles, that's fine."
Yes, I'm with you so far ... my confusion is, I thought that is what the "ready for 4k blah blah" improvements in iOS and Mavericks, etc., were.
I thought that was the whole problem they solved, and I am surprised to see it is not. I can see various apps being broken in this way, but the OS elements should all be scalable arbitrarily...
This is not a general solution however. Even the new and shiny Final Cut Pro X uses rasters throughout.
There's only three ways to support higher resolution displays:
1. Invest in better tools, like Core UI or PaintCode.
2. Exactly double the density and use @2x resources.
3. Switch to "Flat UI" design language.
For the system UI elements, Apple chose option one. For the 3rd party UI elements, Apple chose option two. For iOS, Apple eventually chose option three.
What about 4: ship the actual Illustrator files used to make those raster resources, and just render+cache them for each size the user actually switches to? (In est, treat them like JITable bytecode.)
Yeah, I would've also thought that they'd have the issue somewhat tackled by now. OTOH, I suppose it doesn't help much if the OS itself draws itself correctly if the apps are all wonky.
Yes, I'm with you so far ... my confusion is, I thought that is what the "ready for 4k blah blah" improvements in iOS and Mavericks, etc., were.
I thought that was the whole problem they solved, and I am surprised to see it is not. I can see various apps being broken in this way, but the OS elements should all be scalable arbitrarily...