Screen Resolutions

Question

I am testing an application and need to test it with different screen resolutions with windows form applications.

What is the common resolution tested for now days?

Answer 1

That depends entirely on your application. For the last kiosk application I coded, the resolution was part of the specification, and was set to 1280x1024. If you're making a game, you'll need to support a wide range of resolutions, both fullscreen and windowed.

Answer 2

You will also want to take aspect ratio's into account (ie: wide vs. normal, etc.).

Answer 3

I usually design my windows forms, so that when you resize the form, everything resizes correctly. This usually means setting a reasonable minimum size for the form. I find that this works better than designing for 1 specific resolution.

Answer 4

That depends a great deal on your market/target audience.

I think your safe minimum 1024x768 for desktop apps but don't forget that mini PCs are taking off and they have smaller screens than traditional. If you're gonna run on one of these you need to consider "funkier" resolutions as well.

As far as maximum resolutions... the sky's the limit. Though i think if you look good in 1280x1024 you'll be fine in anything larger too.

Answer 5

Web users:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

http://www.screen-resolution.com/common-screen-resolutions.php

Answer 6

See Google Browser Size.

Answer 7

This will depend on how the Windows forms is laid out, in relation to aspect size and resolution, the fonts used. Before when I developed WinForms applications, I used to rigidly stick to the minimum size of resolution 640 x 480, knowing and having the confidence that it will be fine in resolutions higher then that.

Sadly as it seems, it would make the form look a tad small when under a resolution such as 1,024 x 768!

This is something you need to be aware of.

Another angle of looking at is this - internationalization, yes that flaming international lingo for each label, this could disrupt the flow and layout of the winform itself, suppose you used a label that had a common word such as:

+-----------+
|First name |
+-----------+

Now, suppose this was translated to German (via babelfish.yahoo.com) for an example that label would be

+--------+
|Vorname |
+--------+

Wait! It gets smaller in Spanish (again via babelfish.yahoo.com)

+-------+
|Nombre |
+-------+

Yes, the label has shrunk and the end result, there could be potential gaps or labels flowing into one another because of the internationalization.

Sure, is'nt it great that we all have big fancy screens with resolutions up to 1,920 x 1,0768, on flat 24" screens, but even more so, the readability of the winforms can vary as well depending on whether ClearType is used or not! Even netbooks have a resolution of 1,024 x 600...

This is an interesting question that can underhandedly open up a can of worms as to BEWARE! Ok, I know I made it sound like as if internationalization was the big point behind it, you just do not know until you ask yourself and your superiors, who is the audience and what scope?

You will also earn bonus points if you target accessibility as well, big fonts, small fonts, how are the fields laid out, there is no hard or fast rules involved in this, it would be beneficial to do a small amount of research. Sure, it would be darn handy to drop on a component that will automatically resize the layout of the form scaling upwards for different resolutions, but what about the potential for internationalization...?

Good question worthy of a +1 from me!