Wish High-Density Display Support in B4A IDE

[jrandom1]

Is there any chance for the IDE to support high-DPI displays in the future? The editor is great, but the fonts are hard to read (blurry) when scaled.

 

[Erel]

Which screen are you using?

 

[jrandom1]

Hi Erel, I'm using a 15-inch 2880-by-1800 resolution screen on a Macbook Pro (Bootcamp and Parallels VM). I've tried at the "native" 1440×900 and a few other combinations.

 

[Erel]

Correct me if I'm wrong but currently this issue is only relevant when you run the IDE on a high res Mac computer, right?

 

[jrandom1]

Windows 8.1 includes support for high-PPI displays. The Retina Macbooks are one example. Here are some others that are Windows-based:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-high-res-high-ppi-laptops-1080p-screens.html

So the issue applies to any computer on this list and ones with > ~200 PPI.

There is a workaround so B4A runs in high-res mode, but it has a trade-off. I've attached a screenshot to illustrate (Windows 8.1).

The left is B4A running in traditional mode. The right shows B4A using the workaround. If you maximize the image, the left is blurry and the right one crisp. That's high-res mode. (fyi - you get this by creating a shortcut to the .exe and selecting "Disable display scaling on high-DPI settings".)

The trade-off is that the toolbar icons are now shown in native resolution. So they're tiny. Sorry I'm not sure if this is the right analogy, but what I can think of is dp vs. px.

Are these details helpful?

 

[agraham]

Disabling display scaling allows Windows Forms (the IDE is a Windows Forms application) to automatically scale to suit the display ppi but as you have noted the icons stay at their actual size in pixels. Not all applications will automatically adapt in this way. WPF based ones should but others may just draw at their usual resolution - Adobe stuff seems prone to this as they seem to use Adobes' own UI code.

@Erel I've modified my own version of Basic4ppc to scale under Windows 8.1 so it can run on my Surface Pro. The main IDE did but some of the other Forms did not. I haven't tried B4A or B4J on it to see if they are OK. For interest I've attached a Microsoft document about scaling under Windows 8.1 that might not be easy to find otherwise.

EDIT :- Even zipped it is too big to post Drop me an email if you want it.

 

[Erel]

Thank you for the information. I will further check it.