I think Blackberry missed the boat. A mathematical/vector based UI would have really been exciting. Is there any reason no phone/computer os's don't do this?
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I think Blackberry missed the boat. A mathematical/vector based UI would have really been exciting. Is there any reason no phone/computer os's don't do this?
Probably because no one has any idea what h just said.
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The main reason is the computing power necessary for it.
Memory is more efficient than the use of processor and graphics chop. Your battery life will thank you.
Posted via CB10
I came back and fort to this idea for recent 5 years. Even started some sketches.
It can be great idea, but needs allot of creativity to be worth doing.
If you simply replace the current methods, it simply waste of computing resources.
Vector based UI is great for screen compatibility, but since BlackBerry is trying to standardize the screen size it's pointless to use processing power for it.
It's like calculating a set of numbers every time you need to know the result, instead of using a lookup table with pre calculated results.
Posted via CB10
I don't agree at all.... Its very possible... just look at something like font... You can infinitely zoom on a web page and the font remains crispy clear....
you could just increase the base image quality for icons, so that it matches the larger screen. smaller devices would have overkill... but we're talking about icons...
again... to say that you can load a basic web page of a screen shot of icons, and have it auto zoom to your screen size... but then say it takes too much computing power to display it on your OS? This is just a matter of programming, and building the same UI processing reserved for the browser into the home screen.
...but imagine if the UI was vector based behind the scenes but rendered to rasters on the device, once, and from that point the raster-based UI was absolutely optimized for that specific devices parameters, in consideration of DPI the actual PHYSICAL size of the screen, possibly even using different anti-aliasing or bitmap resampling techniques.
Yes, there are issues of performance, but I've always thought that the right answer for this is a purely vector-based UI (which would limit how it looks to what ever kinds of fills or textures that the Vector-to-Raster engine could generate) that is generated at first-run for a given app, optimized for the device with foreknowledge of the devices physical and virtual characteristics.
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SVG would be better nowadays, or another open-standard vector format that is possibly more capable in terms of texture generation etc. Smartphone CPUs / GPUs are more powerful than desktop PC CPUs/GPUs from the early nineties, so if NeXT could do it then (in a limited fashion) maybe it's time to look at this again.
Just for your information, most true type fonts are vector based. I think BB10 use some kind of true type fonts as well. The technique allows limitless font scaling which I've seen in BB10, Android and many other OSes.
There is nothing that stops us from adding vector based graphics in applications.
The real reason we use bitmaps is that developers are more comfortable creating the widgets as a bitmap rather than vector graphics.
Linux can do vector icons (which appears to be what you're talking about). I'm sure BlackBerry could add it without too much trouble. And it doesn't use processing power. Render home screen icons as raster since you. Ant even zoom on them anyway.
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