The other day a hack became widely available to run the iPad Simulator at 2X, (2048×1536). Perhaps surprisingly (perhaps predictable, it IS Apple after all) other then springboard icons, the Apple apps were all ready to go and rendered properly. But much more interestingly, my current shipping builds of iDecorate, Auto Adjust, and Normalize (which contain @2X artwork – I’m proactive like that) also rendered 100% accurately. No Scaling.

The reasons for this make a lot of sense. iOS could operate in 2X mode for over a year now. It just never was shipped on an iPad.

Guess what will look like shit:

All those magazine apps which are really 1024×1024 rastered images. If you think 500MB per issue is bad wait until you see what happens next. Of course, it will be a while before Adobe updates their tools to support the retina display. Perhaps if Adobe is using bastardized UIImageViews at least the content will be interpolated and not nearest-neighbor.