Windows 8 is going to be released for various kinds of devices,be it the Massive Screens like the 20+” LCD’s or LED monitors or be it the ultrabooks with 14-15″ screens or even the tablets ranging from the 10″ devices.So a major challenge for Microsoft is for Scaling Windows 8 according to the size of the screen on which it will be used.
Recently Microsoft detailed about the Scaling of Screens on Windows 8 in their recent post on Building Windows 8 Blog.As we already know the Windows 8 operating system will run on small screen devices like the tablets,netbooks as well as the devices with medium and large screen like laptops and high end desktops,so to make Windows 8 suitable for every screen size following aspects were amongst the key considerations:
■Screen size: There will be PCs with different screen sizes, from the smaller screens on tablets, to medium sized laptops, and large desktops and all-in-ones. These screens will also come in different shapes or aspect ratios.
■Screen resolution: Screens will have an increasing number of pixels on screen, or screen resolution. In general, the larger the screen, the higher the screen resolution, but this isn’t always the case.
■Pixel density: Screens will also have different pixel densities, which is the number of pixels within a physical area, or dots per inch (DPI.) The pixel density increases as the screen resolution increases, but the screen size remains constant.
By keeping the minimum resolution for the developers to build the apps for the Metro UI of windows 8 is 1024X768 in order to make it as simple as possible for developers to create great apps that work on all the different screens.The reason behind choosing the 1024×768 resolution instead of 800×600 is that the resolution will support rich and beautiful layouts for Metro UI and not the simple layout which would’ve been the case for the 800×600 resolution.
These are the resolutions of the current Windows 7 operating system,which will be supported for all windows 8 based apps(that is including Metro based and desktop based apps)however as shown in the above graph 1024×600 and 1280×720 resolutions will only have support for the desktop version of the apps.
To justify the resolution standards for Metro based apps Microsoft has posted an example of a games layout had it been played on 1024×600 resolution,here’s how it would’ve looked:
So the above image clearly indicates that it would’ve been a disastrous situation had that game been allowed to be played on 1024×600 resolution.
Next comes the resolution which will be supported while multitasking in snap mode is 1366×768.This allows the snapped app to make use of 320 pixel width while the remaining 1024 pixel width is utilized by the mainly running app.So if anybody wants to fully utilize all the features of Windows 8 including the Multitasking Snap,1366×768 is the minimum resolution for it.
Talking about bigger screens with more than 30″ display size,it can support resolutions of 2560×1600,but the thing is that the higher resolutions are considered according to the actual content to be displayed by a particular app on a particular sized screen.
Checkout the
post for a detailed explanation about the large screens and building apps for the large screens using the provided developer tools.
Image Credits[Microsoft]
Tags: Consumer Preview, microsoft, Scaling of Screens, Windows 8 
