[fjorder]

QUESTION: What makes vector graphics based UI's so hard?

I am not a UI designer, so I am ignorant. Please educate me.

Several other posters have mentioned the option of moving away from raster graphics, and indeed this was my own first thought. I remember using IRIX back in the glory-days of SGI. For those who have no idea what I'm blathering on about, IRIX was a professional workstation OS that had en entirely vector based UI. Yes, almost two decades ago an OS existed that was immune to the retina problem. Pause for a moment and let that sink in.

IRIX was actually one of the first GUI-based OS's, and SGI's use of vector-based UI elements probably arose from specific needs SGI faced. I can only speculate on what they were, but one thing they had plenty of was raw power. SGI workstations were very nice in their day! However, the average smartphone built these days probably has more power than all but the last SGI workstations, and perhaps even them too. Processing power is therefore likely not the issue. In fact, given that most desktop OS's already render your desktop in a 3D environment (OSX, Win7, and Linux (depending on what you're running) all do this), vector UI elements may actually be less intensive to draw than raster elements in these situations!

Wild speculation: Is it that UI building tools and API's make working with vector graphical elements painful, or are UI designers just ignorant after almost a decade without a major vector-based OS in common use?

[wmf]

There's really nothing hard about using vectors; they'll just be blurry because they're probably not pixel-fitted. Also, complex icons are much smaller and faster to render in raster format.

[mitchty]

One other facet of vector graphics, they don't always look that great at all scales.

I seem to recall a graphics designer blog that compared a vector to an image that was tweaked at the same scale resolutions. The differences were staggering. I don't think vector graphics are a panacea anymore. I'll see if I can find the link, was rather eye opening.

[nathos]

Relevant links in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252640

[fjorder]

One of the big things I noticed in the first link there was that a SVG icon scaled to different sizes didn't look as good as a hand-optimised set of raster icons, largely due to issues that could conceivable be addressed. e.g. When the SVG icon was scaled, the lines defining the shape also scaled up in thickness so that they appeared far too chunky in the largest version. What if line-width were kept constant as the SVG was scaled?

While that link makes me appreciate that SVG speficially might be hard to work with and that simply scaling everything proportionally might not make for good icons across all sizes, I remain unconvinced that vector icons are hopeless. Perhaps SVG's have the ability to do what I describe above, or perhaps we need a more powerful vector graphics format to work with.

[cpr]

Of course, for Retina displays, those small vector-based graphics will look great. For everyone else, they'll be blurry.

So maybe that will simply add to the "tough for non-Retina users" momentum...