Bjango

I hope this article series helps. My goal was to cover colour management in a way that everyone can understand. If it doesn’t, please feel free to ask questions (I’d love to know where the article fails). https://bjango.com/articles/colourmanagementgamut/

I think it depends what you use them for. Personally, since I use my external monitor for coding, I'd rather optimize for PPI. I love reading code on my MacBook's Retina screen, which is about 218 PPI, and I definitely notice the difference when reading code on non-retina. Unfortunately it's extremely expensive to get the equivalent of Retina PPI in an external monitor. But you can still get decent readability even without Retina PPI if you avoid issues like display scaling. Here's a great blog post [0] about the tradeoffs of screen size, resolution, pixel density, and the "zone of despair" where display scaling causes problems. [0] https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

it doesn't work great, elements are comically too big on 32" 4K or just too big on 27" 4K, you need to scale it to 1080p but then it's too small. MacOS is made for 5K 27" monitors for high DPI (Retina) resolutions or non-high DPI 27" 2560x1440. The only high-DPI 4K screen that works great OOB is the 21.5" 4K Apple display. * https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpX561_XM20

iStat Menus is the venerable favorite: https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

The Bjango team posted a chart for best monitors based on resolution: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

I'm not sure I follow. To me dithering comes from quantization. I don't think you should think of dithering in frequency space. https://bjango.com/images/articles/gradients/dithering-extreme.png Illustrates the same signal dithered or not. No sampling rate involved. And please correct me if i'm wrong, but you can not trade sample accuracy for sampling rate.

I love iStat as a replacement for system controls: the clock, battery and seeing stats for cpu, temperature, network. http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

Check out the articles here: http://bjango.com/articles/ Great resource for what you're looking for. Including downloadable Photoshop actions to make it all easier.

I've found that Skala Preview is also a very solid app for live previewing. Somewhat different to others, it integrates with Photoshop for live retina previews. I've no association, its just a great app. http://bjango.com/mac/skalapreview/

Automatic scaling doesn't work very well. You can find numerous design blogs showing you in great detail why it looks slightly shoddy if you scale from 512x512 down to 128x128 or 64x64, and how below 64x64 you just get into illegibility. For your app to look great you need hand tweaked assets for most resolutions. http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/708404794/ios-app-icon-sizes http://bjango.com/articles/designingforretina2/

Great overview of what's new from Marc Edwards http://bjango.com/articles/photoshopcs6/

OS X not only uses a lame hack to scale, it completely muddles the issue by introducing the concept of "HiDPI" UI elements. Somehow I can set my 4K monitor to use "native resolution" at 3840 x 2160, and yet the UI and fonts look fuzzy! Absolutely terrible, and a complete embarrassment for Apple imo since they are supposedly the UI kings. You only don't notice the issue because you're using a 27" 5k display, which has been "blessed" by Apple as the "correct" DPI to match native screens. For those of us with 4k screens (95% of the market), I guess we're just supposed to enjoy a subpar experience. Even X11 looks better. For me, I only closed the book on the issue after finding BetterDisplay [0]. Basically a 3rd party program that gives you complete control over resolution, display density, and a ton of other options on MacOS. It has a trial mode but it is well well worth the money. With that + the CLI tweak to set font smoothing to 0, the 4K experience on MacOS looks decent. You can even decrease the effective scale of the native screen past "More Space", so those of us with good eyes can actually take advantage of the screen real estate. Also, if you're curious to explore this issue beyond my subjective thoughts here, these [1] [2] blog posts do a great job diving into what is so bad about MacOS scaling, why 4K 27" or 32" screens end up looking bad, and why 5K 27" look okay. [0] https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay [1]…

I highly recommend using Bjango's awesome Skala Preview app[0] on your Mac and iPhone when designing your interfaces. It essentially mirrors your current Ps canvas to the device and let's you see how it will look in native form. It's invaluable for a multitude of reasons. 1) things really do look much "better" on the retina than for example my thunderbolt or MacBook Air display. 2) a lot of people have a hard time with the initial jolt of designing for 2x the standard dpi. Most of the 1px lines you'll draw for the web need to be 2px in photoshop to appear as 1px on the device. I have an equally long list of things I would love to share as a long time web developer who moved into iOS and wanted to do things "the right way". This post from SeatGeek and all of the Bjango articles[1] are excellent resources for someone getting started with this -- [0]: http://bjango.com/mac/skalapreview/ [1]: http://bjango.com/articles/

For technical skills, I would recommend using Photoshop for web/ui design. Unfortunately at the moment it's the best out there. Some good things to seek out are adjustment layers and layer effects. Bjango has some great tutorials, although they are focused on UI design: http://bjango.com/articles/ In terms aesthetics, the most import thing is to develop your 'design palate'. Seek out excellent craftsmanship and learn to distinguish it from the mediocre. An excellent place to start is SiteInspire: http://siteinspire.com/ I would also recommend learning the fundamentals of design. Typography and grid systems are very important study areas. A great place to start is this forum thread: http://www.designerstalk.com/forums/graphic-design/42390-design-basics… For empirical testing of designs, I would highly recommend Lukas Mathis' Designed for Use: http://pragprog.com/book/lmuse/designed-for-use Be warned however that the print version is horridly designed, just get the .epub to bypass the ugly formatting. And always have in the back of your mind: 'less is more'. Just because you've learned how to do fancy gradients, reflections and rounded corners, doesn't mean you should.

Not in the Apple world, and this article is centered on Apple. https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ - 24" you need 4k - 27" you need 5K. - 32" you need 6k. Windows subpixel aliasing (Clear Type) manages a lot better with lower pixel density. Since Windows still has a commanding market share in enterprise, you might be right about the industry standard for HiDPI but for Apple-specific usage, not really.

This [1] has good examples. 24" 4K is on the smaller side and so less noticeable than on larger displays like 27" or 32". [1] https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

> but what are you able to do about it? On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed. For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max) For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!

> The standard PPI on MacOS is 72 […] [citation needed] ? Where did you get that number from? Not saying you're wrong (or right), I'm just curious where you came up with that number? Perhaps 'back in the day' MacOS 9-based hardware does that? [1][2] Per [3], it seems that non-Retina displays should be 100-120 ppi and Retina should be 200-230. [1] https://www.photoshopessentials.com/essentials/the-72-ppi-web-resoluti… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch [3] https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

I've been for many years a happily paying customer of iStat Menus [1], from which this seem to be the heavily inspired of. [1] https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

That depends on the size. For 27" or larger, the recommened resolution is 1440p (non-retina) or 5K (retina). 4K is ok if you're going for smaller sizes. More information here: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ Just recently bought 27" Dell and I'm quite happy with it (for coding).

Ideally, you want a screen that natively runs at a resolution that’s a perfect 2x multiplier of a mainstream 1x resolution that has the right amount of screen real estate for the screen size. So for example, a 20”-24” screen should be 4K so it can run at 1920x1080 @ 2x. Similarly for 27”, you want 5K which is 2560x1440 @ 2x. This is a really good post describing how it all works: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

I will leave this here for those looking for detail on what PPI they need at what size for a Retina display like sharpness. https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

Those posts were helpful, thanks. From their table that lists the various displays[0], it seems like two smaller displays are more likely to work well vs a larger display — 25 - 29 inch rather than the 38" I have. Are there truly no displays in the 30"+ category that are good for retina? [0]:https://bjango.com/images/articles/macexternaldisplays/display-list.pn… EDIT: I'm seriously wondering whether I ought to just get the Studio Display. It's $1,599 (or $1,899) which is not that much more than I spent on the LG (~$1,160)

The most popular one for many years is https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/, have you tried that? It says it's compatible with Apple Silicon.

I’ve been using this for almost a decade https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

iStat Menus offer this for modern macOS. The disk activity is not that relevant for me, but networking is useful. When I'm waiting for something and there is no network activity I know something's fishy. https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

But does Xcode convert PDF and SVG to various PNG assets? https://bjango.com/articles/svgassetcatalogs/ It's my understanding, as a designer, that it was auto-generating 2x and 3x PNGs as from your vector assets, and that's what actually got bundled in the final app—and that PNG compression was not good compared to what I could get by going through ImageOptim. I would be quite happy to be wrong about that. It would save me a lot of time.

I just discovered the same dreadful thing with 27" 4K monitors, and found this site which explains what Macs are doing: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ TLDR: use monitors that are around 110 or 220 PPI. The 27" 4K is right in the middle at 163 PPI.

Sadly you need a 5k screen for a 27" display to get to 200+ DPI: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/ The LG UltraFine 5K is the only affordable display on the market with that resolution, and it's plagued with issues.