Hello,
I'm programming a few picture viewers for the iPad and the problem that I always have is that unless you use a really big resolution image source, when the user zooms, the image will get pixelated.
I was thinking that maybe some kind of upscaling filter could be applied to the image when zoomed. Like the ones here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms.
The result would be an image that would not look perfectly fine, but will do look aesthetically better than just the big ugly pixels.
I remember playing GBA using Visual Boy Advance, scaling the game to full screen and applying the 'Super Eagle' filter to get a picture that was pleasant enough to play with.
There are 2 issues that come to my mind right now:
Where to implement those filters. Should I create a new static UIImage with an upscaled version of an original UIImage, or should I apply the filter (perhaps overriding drawRect) over an UIImageView.
If the iPad processing power would be enough to resample the images at realtime without affecting the user experience.
I'm planning to start working on this project as soon as I get some spare time. Let me know what you think. Any suggestions on where to start, what would be better, etc... would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.