High DPI friendly software and websites

Hello! I'm sure I'm not the only person owning a laptop with a high dpi screen and being frustrated by the fact so little has been optimized for these. I've already been searching the web for good examples and I figured it would help everyone in my situation if there was a list of these (I haven't been able to find one, except for a Mac only "Retina" dedicated website). I hope you will contribute.

If you want to check your dpi, you may go here. I'm not sure how the screen size is calculated, but it was incorrect in my case, so you may have to correct it.

The main issue with graphics not designed for high dpi screens is the fact you either get tiny UI or upscaled and pixelated/blurry images. Text is usually but not always handled better.

Rules and information

1. This will be a list of high dpi friendly software and websites. Make sure you've read the forum rules before you suggest anything, or at least use common sense (no adult content, no pirating or other illegal stuff). Websites will be sorted by language and country (I may start sorting them by type if the lists grow large). Software will be sorted by type alone, but will have language tags.
2. To be considered high dpi-friendly, content should look crisp at a size which won't cause eye-strain. This can be achieved in several ways, but all that matters here is the result. In the case of websites, low resolution pictures may be allowed in certain cases (news articles etc.) but shouldn't exist in the UI or other design elements, including logotypes.
3. What is considered high dpi? It's hard to set a specific number, I'd rather say any resolution on any laptop sized screen over Full HD (1920x1080) will suffice. I'm willing to listen if you have a different opinion.
4. Websites should be popular (high traffic). So I won't add personal blogs and websites (unless they are exceedingly popular) and such. I will allow discussions of such sites however. National agencies and such are okay regardless.
5. Metro apps won't count for software, as most of these are already optimized.

Software

Productive
Illustration
Clip Studio Paint
Others
Microsoft Office 2013


Web browsers
Internet Explorer



Websites

English - International
Miiverse - Official Nintendo gaming community
Vimeo - Video sharing
Wikipedia - Online encyclopedia

Swedish - Sweden
Sony Official site
Sveriges Radio - Radio
TT - News Agency

 

For some reason you neglected to state the resolution of your screen. (Maybe I missed it) If it is Full HD (1920x1080) then look at some HD vids from youtube or Vimeo. Those look stunning on my Full HD (1920x1080) laptop screen. Even Vegas Movie Studio looks good in that resolution. Sure, maybe some things look smaller but that is because laptop screens are small. Get a external monitor that is bigger then you will see the benefit.

 

HiDPI is well over 1920x1080. The Lenovo T540p has a screen at 2880x1620. At this resolution, on smaller screens (ie. the T540p's 15"), there are dramatic changes to the user experience that the OS and apps have to overcome. The DPI has to be adjusted and everything needs to compensate for that. So far.. yeesh.

 

Yes. To put this more bluntly, at least with Windows (doesn't matter which version), true high-DPI screens on laptops are often unusable with a lot of software out there.

 

Indeed, MS software tends to do well, but oh gosh the third party software. You should see chrome at 2560x1600 on a 10" display.

 

I dunno about MS software tending to do well - a lot of Windows components, like services.msc, don't support HiDPI.

 

Sorry, it's 2880x1600 (customized Sony Vaio Fit Muli-flip 15A). And it says resolutions above Full HD

 

They prioritized stuff people look at frequently and new dialogue boxes. You dig down a few layers and it gets blurry, but it's not unusable, and it's not typically stuff you're staring at for long periods if you have an UHD display anyway.

I'm still surprised Chrome of all things remains HiDPI broken. Firefox is fine, IE of course is fine. They didn't have any problem doing HiDPI on the Mac.

 

Chrome has issues on OS X, but it's odd that HiDPI isn't one of them.

 

Functionally, yes. But neither are optimized with high resolution (or vector) UI, the UI simply scales. The browser window is fine though.

So far there is only Internet Explorer. Opera has a terribly buggy flag setting in the latest developer release for high DPI support. I hope it will have turned into something good for the next release.


Does nobody have suggestions for the list by the way? Clip Studio Paint is proof there is third party support. I think I've heard that some of Adobe's software work too (Illustrator and Lightroom I think?), but I haven't been able to confirm that. And I'd be surprised if there were no other websites.

 

> Does nobody have suggestions for the list by the way? Clip Studio Paint is proof there is third party support. I think I've heard that some of Adobe's software work too (Illustrator and Lightroom I think?), but I haven't been able to confirm that. And I'd be surprised if there were no other websites.

Hi, I promised to give you some feedback and here it is:

- I read that Lightroom 5 has HiDPI support now. They are actually at v5.4 right now, while I'm still at v4.4 so I can't verify that.

- I also remember a well-known German magazine claiming that the newest PowerDVD - v14 - has HiDPI support.
At the moment I run v10 that came with the external Blu-ray drive on my HiDPI Vaio Flip 15 and it is far from good as it reduces the screen area to something between 2880 and 1920 (2880 obviously is 1920 x 1.5 so I'm wondering why do that in the first place, but as it's an old version the point is moot anyway).
So folks, if you are interested in PowerDVD get yourself a demo version to see if it actually works.

- From casual testing Libre Office made a good impression on me with most GUI elements scaling well. I usually use 200% scaling (because I'm usually too lazy to get my reading glasses ;-)) and except for a few checkboxes that remain relatively small the menus I tested are rendered well and no texts were cut off.

- A total failure right now is the FastStone Image Viewer (v5.1): No scaling at all so keep your magnifying glass handy!

- For the moment I resort to Irfan View as my main desktop-based image viewer which seems to be acceptable with HiDPI displays.

- I also tested two BlitzMax IDEs briefly: The standard MaxGUI which seems to cope very well and the much more advanced "BLIde for BlitzMax" which is also very usable at 200%. The default font looks a bit pixelated but I haven't tried customized layouts, yet (I expect nobody to even know BlitzMax here, anyway, as it has a very small user base).

 

Hi, I promised to give you some feedback and here it is, although I haven't explored each and every feature.
Keep in mind that I usually use 200% scaling on my Vaio Flip 15A (resolution: 2880 x 1620) which I think looks best.

- My file manager of choice (for 16 years, no less!) is "Total Commander and it scales well. I currently use v8.50.

- From casual testing Libre Office made a good impression on me with nearly all GUI elements scaling well. A few checkboxes in the preferences menu appeared smallish, though.
Because LO is quite extensive I could only test a fraction of it but I saw no texts being cut off and the simple vector graphics I use were nice.

- A total failure right now is the FastStone Image Viewer (v5.1): No scaling at all so keep your magnifying glass handy!

- Adobe PhotoShop Elements 12 that came with my Vaio is a near HiDPI failure, too: Only the actual pull-down menus are scaled - everything else isn't, including the menu titles! The old saying "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth!" is surely true but PSE12 is no pleasure at 2880x1620 on a 15.5" display, IMHO.

- For the moment I resort to Irfan View as my main desktop-based image viewer which seems to be acceptable with HiDPI displays. It uses large but dull icons but I can live with that.

- A specialized tile-drawing tool is PyxelEdit which scales well. Note that I use the most recent full-featured commercial version and not the old free beta.

- I also tested two BlitzMax IDEs briefly: The standard MaxGUI which seems to cope very well (it's very simple, though) and the much more complex "BLIde for BlitzMax" which is also very usable at 200%. The default font looks a bit pixelated but I haven't tried customized layouts, yet (I expect nobody to even know BlitzMax here, anyway, as it has a very small user base).
- The BlitzMax support tool "Logic GUI" also seems to work well with HiDPI - I saw no problems while quickly testing it.

Rumor mill:

- I read that Lightroom 5 has HiDPI support now. They are actually at v5.4 right now, while I'm still at v4.4 so I can't verify that. I play to install my LR version in the future, though, to test it.

- I also remember a well-known German magazine claiming that the newest PowerDVD - v14 - has HiDPI support.
At the moment I run v10 that came with my external Samsung Blu-ray drive and it is far from good as it reduces the screen area to something between 2880 and 1920 (2880 obviously is 1920 x 1.5 so I'm wondering why they do that in the first place, but as it's an old version the point is moot anyway).
So folks, if you are interested in PowerDVD get yourself a demo version to see if it actually works.

Edit:
I now got PowerDVD v10 to work fine with the Flip - for some reason it didn't switch to 1920x1080 (16:9) screen resolution but into 1920x1200 (16:10) mode - although the movies I tested also had a 16:9 ratio.
After I manually corrected this everything looked and worked fine. Even the output to my TV via HDMI worked flawlessly - thanks to HDCP it even disabled the video on the notebook and only showed it on the TV (which is how I expected it). When I pulled the HDMI plug out of the notebook the video returned to the notebook display - just like it should.

 

BTW, LibreOffice added HiDPI support in 4.2.3: LibreOffice HiDPI Patches « keithcu.com

@Calibrator, is that what you tested with?

 

Yes, I directly installed the newest version.

 

Okay, you have the fixes. They just got out there April 10th. More needs to happen, but it should look better. :hi2: