Windows 8 to be Retina ready

While the spotlight might be on Apple for its Retina display technology featured on the new iPad this week, Microsoft has staked its claim that the OEMs they use are building post-HD resolutions for upcoming Windows 8 tablets. In a ‘Building Windows 8’ blog post today, they state that the company is talking about things like device diversity and a variety or pixel densities.

Windows and dots per inch (DPI) have never always been as ideal as they could have been and they put this down to desktop apps not built to scale ideally with their interface which resulted in a smaller user experience of elements on screens with rather higher DPI numbers. Microsoft is dealing with these issues with its new Metro style applications. Developers will be able to use 3 different sweet spots with pixel densities to scale their graphics and visual elements within apps.

Given that that the new iPad adopts a scale factor of 200% due to a higher pixel density, Microsoft has gone for diversity rather than a higher figure specifically by proposing three scale percentages for Windows 8. The first will be with no scaling at 100%, 140% for HD tablets and finally for quad-XGA tablets, a whopping 180%. As for developers, they will be able to use vector graphics or CSS3 to load images at separate scales.

Microsoft is urging developers to think more about larger screens to ensure that the Metro UI apps make use of the space efficiently. Given all the discussions about Metro apps, Microsoft has not made any mention of resolution scaling improvements for Windows 8 in desktop mode.  Our friends over at TheVerge have reported that the Consumer Preview version is largely untouched from Windows 7, so it appears that most of the scaling and obviously touch-mode friendly improvements are designed for the Metro-styled UIs, for now.