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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

This icon size fragmentation will doom the iPhone platform!

More seriously, could someone just resize the big one a few times so we can compare and see what actual benefit is being provided here?

This pixel obsession seems like a useless hangover of the 72ppi desktop days, just like the "programmer" fonts and pixel-art games that mean so much to people of a certain vintage but baffle younger folks.

Yes it made a difference then, but every increase in pixel density and resolution has made it a less and less useful way to spend your time.

Making pixel perfect icons for a platform advertised as having pixels too small to see seems particularly odd.

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I've done some quick rescaling examples. Rescaled are to the right on the iOS ones, above for the OSx ones.

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/8020/iosicons.png

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/6851/osxicons.png

The iOS ones aren't the best example - it's not a complex icon - but you can still see the hand crafted ones are better, e.g. some of the lines on the rescaled items are not the desired 1 or 2 px widths and so look blurry (e.g. the ipad icon); you don't have the texture; and you lose the corner line definition (e.g. see ipad settings).

The OSx ones are better examples as it's more complex. The scaled icons look rubbish.

We're not there yet. You still need to tweak icons so they look good at various sizes - subtle things like 1px lines or highlights still need to manual tweaking. Pixels too small to see doesn't make the problem go away, you still want to optimise for resolution so you match the pixel grid for sharp definition. Some people don't have that attention to detail (and those devs can just rescale them) but many do - and personally I think it's worth it. And I appreciate having the opportunity to hand craft rather than have the OS just scale it for me.

Nice work. For the iOS ones the only one I can really see any meaningful difference for is the iPad one, and for that one I prefer the scaled version as it seems more "blueprinty" to me. As with text, sticking to the pixel grid can cause things to become unexpectedly bold or thin as you change scale. Similar happens to the smallest size icon too, though it's not as big a difference.

Tried it on my iPhone too, but wasn't sure how to ensure 1-to-1 pixel scale, default in Photo viewer seemed like it might be that though.

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