See how your interface looks like at different resolutions assuming you have the developer items installed.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060119152725322

Wow, scaling up the UI resolution reminds me of the original Mac, where the menu bar, icons, windows, scroll bars, etc. took up a major portion of the screen real estate!!

The Mac hasn't been true WYSIWYG either since the original Mac, where both the screen and printer were 72 DPI (the ImageWriter also supported a 144 DPI non-WYSIWIG mode.)

I'm not sure I want to go back to low-resolution screens, but it would be nice to have screen resolution that's close to printer resolution. I've used IBM's high resolution 4+ megapixel display, and it's amazing how much better everything looks - for example, scans of maps and newspapers are extremely legible.

While this is a great article, as the patent give us many new details about how it could be implemented in Leopard, it was already clear in my mind that it was a planned feature for 10.5 , especially after finding that page:

http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsImaging/ResolutionIndependentUI.html

As far as I know, Windows is not really resolution independent, it does enable you to resize the main interface widgets, but there is much more to be done to achieve a true resolution independent UI, and from what I've read, Vista won't improve that.

As the above guest mentioned, you can access Apple's first attempts at this if you have the developer tools installed in Tiger. It's currently a little quirky (which is why it's not a real feature yet, of course), but here are a few quick points I want to make on it:

1. Text scales perfectly, since it's all vector-based to begin with. If you double the size of something with 12-point text, it's basically like looking at 24-point text. Very nice.

2. Resolution controls can be different from application to application. When this feature goes prime-time, I wouldn't be surprised to see it even go window-for-window. I think it's very cool that you don't have to change everything.

3. Bitmapped elements, like buttons, scrollbars, close boxes and most UI elements, appear blocky when blown up (the text on them is perfect, though, as I mentioned above). This is to be expected, of course. It's quite possible that in Leopard, Apple will make all their interface elements vector-based so they'd scale nicely. It's also possible they'll simply pre-render many different bitmapped versions at different sizes, and pick which is appropriate every time it needs to be drawn. They could also just have one bitmapped version rendered at a very high resolution, and scale it down as appropriate. Quartz already has an excellent caching system for this kind of thing built in. Either way, I would expect all scaled elements to look very good when Apple makes this a real feature.

4. There's currently no way to change the resolution of only the content. It's all or nothing (per app). Meaning you can't blow up your web pages in Safari without also blowing up things like the menu bar, the window border, the scroll bars, the toolbar, etc. A bummer from my perspective. Again, this could be changed in its final form. I sure hope so.

5. The fact that the menu bar blows up with everything else kills the feature for me. Already, my menu bar is practically full from edge to edge on my 1280x1024 monitor. Blowing it up means I can't see every menu. I don't want to blow up my menus, so I hope there will be a way to leave the menu bar alone. Again, I hope there will be window-by-window settings for this in the future, which would solve this problem.

Part of the reason there isn't a resolution-independent implementation is that it often LOWERS the quality, not improves it. For icons and bitmaps, if you draw them huge then scale them down, they tend to look "fuzzy", and if you scale them up, "blocky". Look at the latest Java2D implementations when you start adding scale factors to the Graphics2D for how bad things can get. It looks like Apple isn't going to do it until they can do it right, which is nice to see.

By the way, you won't see laserwriter-quality displays until the graphics card, RAM, display connectors, internal memory busses, and, for laptops, battery capacity are all sufficiently improved. It's not just a matter of putting the pixels closer together unless you want an iPod-sized screen.

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Guest wrote:
While this is a great article, as the patent give us many new details about how it could be implemented in Leopard, it was already clear in my mind that it was a planned feature for 10.5 , especially after finding that page:

http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsImaging/ResolutionIndependentUI.html

As far as I know, Windows is not really resolution independent, it does enable you to resize the main interface widgets, but there is much more to be done to achieve a true resolution independent UI, and from what I've read, Vista won't improve that.

From the link you provide:
"Important Note: Resolution Independent UI will not be a user level feature in Tiger and won't be exposed anywhere in the user interface."

If you run the QuartzDebug and play with the settings, first you'll see that it leaves artifacts all over the place. The menus get botched up, random color blotches get introduced. And worse still, when you set scaling back to 1.0, the menu redraws wrong requiring either logging out of your account or rebooting to set it straight. Not only is the user side not ready for prime time, the actual hooks (which is all that Tiger provides) are not yet ready. Still, its a start!

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Guest wrote:
Part of the reason there isn't a resolution-independent implementation is that it often LOWERS the quality, not improves it. For icons and bitmaps, if you draw them huge then scale them down, they tend to look "fuzzy", and if you scale them up, "blocky". Look at the latest Java2D implementations when you start adding scale factors to the Graphics2D for how bad things can get. It looks like Apple isn't going to do it until they can do it right, which is nice to see.

By the way, you won't see laserwriter-quality displays until the graphics card, RAM, display connectors, internal memory busses, and, for laptops, battery capacity are all sufficiently improved. It's not just a matter of putting the pixels closer together unless you want an iPod-sized screen.

I dont really agree with you. First, the dock shows that you can scale bitmaps really cleanly. It's a matter of starting with a higher resolution. As far as higher resolution screens, most of the laptop battery is taken up by the backlighting, not the extra pixels. Throwing more memory on video cards is no big deal either. Ever since the apple 30" display (and now the dell 30" display) came out, you see a lot more cards out that support dual link like its no big deal. The availablitly of the high res cards at relatively affordable rates will drive the move to laser like displays. The rest of the components will cost only marginally more compared to the cost of the super high rez LCDs.

I'm the guest that posted the Apple developer site link. I'm under the impression that one guest felt the need to correct me with the post entitled "Not in Tiger, in 10.5".

I never said it was a user-end feature in Tiger, but the fact that it's there for developers in itself made it clear (to me) that they are planning to "open it" to users starting with 10.5.

Quartz is great for LCD but text still seems fuzzy. Unfortunately using Windows at work with an LCD screen and ClearType enabled is extremely clear. Wish it could be that clear on my Mac.

I don't thnk you know what resolution independent means if you think Window's is. Window's has a feature that can scale based on a DPI setting, but the layout of wiindows and pages definetly takes a hit.

"Even with the introduction of the new HD displays on its laptops, Apple still trails Dell, which offers resolutions up to 1920x1200 on their laptops (while Apple's max out at 1680x1050). One reason why is that without a scalable UI, Apple simply cannot push resolutions any higher without making the screen type and elements too small."

Yeah again you make it sound like Windows really does have resolution independent UI, but it doesn't. The reason Dell offers such high resolution displays is because it gives them big numbers to put on their spec sheets. They don't care about whether the UI is readable at that resolution. Apple on the other hand does.

"Providing a Windows like ruler so the user can match a real world ruler to the screen would make things easier."

John,

Would this help?

http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/

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ericl wrote:
Quartz is great for LCD but text still seems fuzzy. Unfortunately using Windows at work with an LCD screen and ClearType enabled is extremely clear. Wish it could be that clear on my Mac.

That must be subjective. I use Windows with a HP LCD and text looks like mud - way inferior to the 20in iMac LCD I'm looking at right now.

A matter of set-up, perhaps?

The scaling that windows does is terrible. Almost everyone I know with a high res windows laptop hates "all the small text". If you turn the scaling on, there are so many bugs that all web pages look like crap, applications have buttons drawn wrong, and STILL much of the text in applications is small. Since I routinely help friends and relatives buy computers, I always have to make sure they get the lower res screen. I once bought a high res dells as a replacement for 4 yr old IBM laptops, only to get the dell back, as the text was too hard to read. I agree with Biff.

I am a systems administrator dealing with this very issue. All of my users have been upgraded to 1400 x 1050 resolution tablet computers, and the vast majority of them are complaining because the type is too small. You can increase the size of certain window elements, but to increase the type in a main window your application has to support it directly. Most don't, and those that do have different and confusing ways to change the type size, making it a tedious task to make things readable.

11 years behind Windows, my ass. The anti-Apple bias is pretty thick in this post.

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Brutno wrote:
"Providing a Windows like ruler so the user can match a real world ruler to the screen would make things easier."

John,

Would this help?

http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/

With Windows, you line up the screen ruler to a real ruler, and then Windows computer the correct screen DPI, all with one single drag of the ruler. Just showing a screen ruler does not accomplish that.

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Looks like Apple may finally be catching up with Windows in the User Interface department in one sorely long overlooked area -- User Interface (UI) resolution independence

What a stupid comment.

No version of Windows provides a resolution-independent interface.

Et tu. But then at work we use the cheapest Dell LCD you can buy.

(I'm aware higher end Dell use the same panels as the Cinema Display).

IMO - the biggest problem with this is the increase in development cost - validating things look correct at different resolutions, etc.

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deasys wrote:

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Looks like Apple may finally be catching up with Windows in the User Interface department in one sorely long overlooked area -- User Interface (UI) resolution independence

What a stupid comment.

No version of Windows provides a resolution-independent interface.

Well since you say so, it must be so. Despite them having the ruler feature that sets the DPI resolution for the display. We have it on your authority. Why didn't you say so sooner.

"Looks like Apple may finally be catching up with Windows in the User Interface department in one sorely long overlooked area..."

This is inflammatory nonsense. Yes, resolution-independence is a good idea, and Windows does this better, although not without some serious caveats and bugs.... HOWEVER, the phrase "Apple may be finally catching up with Windows in the User Interface department" implies that Windows (Microsoft?) has always (or at least for a long enough time to justify the word "finally") been far ahead of Apple (the Macintosh? the Apple //gs? the Newton? the Lisa?) in the "User Interface department," while nothing could be further from the truth.

It is also true that the Macintosh has adopted a few features that showed up first on Windows (e.g. the arrow icon on aliases, persistent menus), but on the whole the design and feature migration has been primarily in the opposite direction. I forget who first said it, but the phrase "All modern computers are Macintoshes" has a fair amount of truth to it! And in general, the Macintosh of today seems to resemble the Windows machine of the future...

A more reasonable phrase would be "Windows does have a few good features that are missing from the Macintosh, and resolution-independence is one of them..."

Another Windows feature I would like to see on the Mac is the floppy-like handling of CD-RW discs.

You obviously didn't download and try the application, as that is exactly what it does.

I use Excel 2003 at work on a Windows 2000 system, and at home on an XP system and have my resolution set to 1280x1024 on both systems. Apparently, Microsoft must not have thought anyone would be using Excel at that resolution (or highter) since there are bugs in many of their dialog boxes that result in many of the tabs being obscured (the cell format dialog box most prominent).

So much for "resolution independence".

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Guest wrote:
You obviously didn't download and try the application, as that is exactly what it does.

You obviously have no clue what I'm talking about. Free ruler a) doesn't let you simply drag and "stretch" the units out to a to match a real world ruler (it lets you stretch the length of the ruler, NOT THE UNITS THAT COMPRISE THE RULER). And, b) it only has a unit conversion pref that lets you type in different dpi settings THAT AFFECT THE RULER ONLY. So a) it's interface is not as good as windows, and b) IT DOES NOT AFFECT THE REST OF THE OPERATING SYSTEMS EFFECITIVE DPI SETTING SO ALL OTHER PROGRAMS KEEP RUNNING AT THE DEFAULT DPI SETTING---now wait for it...--IT DOES NOT AFFECT HOW ANY OTHER APPS OR THE SYSTEM DRAWS STUFF.

The windows ruler lets you stretch it to match the real world, and get this, changes the default dpi setting for the entire operating system and draws all other programs to match that new dpi setting.

So before you go spouting off like the arrogant jerk you apparently you are, why dont you try the feature in windows and buy a clue as to what it does.

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coaten wrote:

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ericl wrote:
Quartz is great for LCD but text still seems fuzzy. Unfortunately using Windows at work with an LCD screen and ClearType enabled is extremely clear. Wish it could be that clear on my Mac.

That must be subjective. I use Windows with a HP LCD and text looks like mud - way inferior to the 20in iMac LCD I'm looking at right now.

A matter of set-up, perhaps?

I agree with ericl -- text is very fuzzy for me on my Planar 20" monitor, no matter what form of font smoothing I choose. But it's much better -- almost perfect -- on my Powerbook. So, no doubt the monitor plays a part in this, but it is disappointing to me that OS X, which is superior to Windows in so many ways, falls far short in this area on my monitor.