A High Resolution Experience

There’s a new generation of devices really changing how we look at the web, Apple calls it Retina, others call it HiDPI (high dots per inch), but it’s been trickling its way up mostly through mobile phones and then in tablets with the iPad 3.

Basically the idea is that the pixels are so close together you can’t even see them, even if you put your nose right up to the screen. (Wipe off your screen now.) My mind was personally blown when I first saw the new Retina Macbook Pro — basically Apple took the clarity of the retina screen and brought it to full 15″ laptop (which also has amazing other specs) and the result is remarkable. So much so that it ruins you, like the first time you saw a HDTV and then had to look back at a regular one again.

The one disadvantage is that many apps, and most websites, don’t have high-resolution equivalents of all their graphics to take advantage of the new screen, so they get “doubled” and look fuzzy, they stand out like a sore thumb.

You may have noticed that we’ve been going bit by bit through the entire WordPress dashboard, the reader, and all of our sites updating them to take advantage of this new capability, often crafting new icons and graphics by hand. (Go by an Apple store and check out WordPress.com if you want to get a taste of it, but I warn you it’s hard to go back.)

But for you guys we can go a step further. All of your blog posts will now serve high-resolution images for users that can see them, at least the images that we host. Since we create all images dynamically on the fly, what we do is if you’ve uploaded a higher resolution photo and sized it down, we’ll serve a double-size so it looks super sharp to those visitors — they’ll think you’re ahead of the game.

We’ve also completely revamped Gravatar to be Retina-ready, and made it so that all Gravatars across WordPress.com are HiDPI as well.

Here’s how sharp things look on a HiDPI device compared to a regular display:

P.S. We just launched the same available for Jetpack users, our second simulaunch.

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