Currently I develop and maintain a desktop site on 1200 px wide and a mobile app developed on 380 pix wide. I have been impressed with the responsive engine and both my apps look acceptable on almost all resolutions.
I think it would be good to have them both rolled into one and not develop features twice for reduced development time and a more consistent look.
I am not yet sure if it will be better to maintain both or develop for let’s say 640 wide and make one design look good across the board.
I deploy apps through web wrappers and that works acceptable so far. I am not sure how a higher resolution will scale down or any other problems I could expect.
Please share your experiences with us. What is the best resolution to develop for? What works, what doesn’t? Anything in particular to look out for?
I design for two resolutions: iPad and everything larger is one group, the other group is anything with a lower resolution than the iPad. The main reason I do this is because I try to design my pages to leverage the format the user is using, and smaller screen, touch users are going to be doing different things and interacting in different ways.
It’s definitely possible to design once and scale it appropriately, but I would start your thought process from the perspective of the user, not the builder. “Do my mobile users need a different experience than my desktop users?”
