Dealing with small iPad Mini (6th gen) screen

I just realized that my game has some problems on the iPad mini’s 2266×1488 screen.

It’s actually a UIKit app, and I do a fair amount of adapting to different screen sizes. However, my designer made the (then-reasonable) assumption that iPad screens were at least 768 points high. The mini is only 744 points, and so UI screens that were designed to exactly hold their content, don’t have enough room.

If this were a Unity game, everything would probably just be scaled down a little from a 1024×768 display. Is there a way to do that as a UIKit app? This wouldn’t be ideal, but it would let mini owners play the game.

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ddunham
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UI screens that were designed to exactly hold their content

That was unfortunate.

iPad mini screen has been enlarged, but with a different form factor (in Portrait mode, higher but a bit less wide). So you miss 24 points in height when in landscape.

How do you do adapt for those who play the game on other iPad (larger ones) or on iPhone with smaller screens ?

Posted by
Claude31
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  • It was a reasonable choice in 2012 (and it is an adaptive layout).

    iPhone is massively smaller and has a different layout (which is not really appropriate for the mini).

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    ddunham
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Can't you offer to sacrifice 12 points at top and 12 points at bottom by having the whole view extending beyond the limits ?

See also this thread:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/689939

Posted by
Claude31
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  • No, the height (it’s a landscape game) is the problem. The game handles the extra width just fine.

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    ddunham
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The new iPad Mini (6th generation) introduces a new, smaller(!), screen size?

I already wrote about this here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/689939

Apple are also emailing developers about this issue.

Posted by
robnotyou
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  • Your next step is to recompile the app using Xcode 13 and the SDK for iPadOS 15. Then test it again.

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    robnotyou

  • That’s actually how I found out there’s a problem. Apple did not mail me telling me that the screen is smaller in one dimension.

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    ddunham
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Completely agree. In the entire history of iOS/iPadOS devices, Apple has never made the short edge of the screen narrower in terms of resolution. Every single iPhone and iPod touch has always had a minimum width of 320 points. For iPads, this was 768 points.

768 minus 744 is only 24 points which I believe is around 1/8 inch physical size. Clearly they could have made the new mini at tad less tall and a tad wider; i.e. preserve the 768 width. It could still have slightly more than 1024 points in its height.

For one of my apps, this will be a trivial fix to change content of some very large buttons. It uses autolayout, but I assumed a minimum short edge of 768.

For a game app though, 768 was such a nice number. I needed at least 8 game pieces across, so each piece was rendered at 96 point. I believe Apple's fix is to now letterbox apps (if set to run full screen) which will then render images at 96.875%. Hopefully not too many drawing artifacts show up for folks due to this.

Posted by
InstantInteractive
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  • I would happily letterbox if I knew how! As a UIKit app (which uses constraints), the game cheerfully takes advantage of the width, and does layout based on top and bottom, which ends up overlapping elements.

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    ddunham
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