Forgetting overheating and your warm lap. The new iPad could prove to be a real problem for websites that haven’t optimized their images for the tablet’s retina display. To be clear, that’s pretty much every website between the North and South Poles. Remember the first time you saw a TV show taped in HD on an HD television? That’s kind of what the difference is between viewing optimized images vs. ones that aren’t. The problem for designers is that the new iPad is really the only device on which people might perceive a problem, and adjusting images can cost big bucks. There’s the cost of bandwidth for bigger file sizes, not to mention the sheer man-hours it takes to resize and re-upload everything.
The New York Times points out: “another obstacle is the time that a Web site takes to load,” which could mean slower browsing times for you.
All those magazine apps designed specifically for the first two versions of the iPad are also getting a dose of tough love from the new retina display. If you were to look at a scanned PDF of a magazine on one of the earlier versions, it would be pretty blurry, so magazines created apps that corrected the problem. Now a PDF looks pretty amazing. Buzz Feed writes, “Seeing a perfectly rendered print layout on an iPad has to make publishers wonder, what’s the point?”
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
