Screen Resolution
Originally posted by rmac
anyone else think that Panther will include a resolution independent version of Quartz? Then Apple could start using these high res notebook monitors that are used on PCs with little or no drawbacks; could always expand things up when reading small text, or leave things smaller when using things like Photoshop. Resizing of icons works amazingly well, especially if you've seen how other OS's look when they do it (pretty ugly). Dell had what, a 1920 x 1200 on one of their laptops.
Sorry for the confusion about what I was trying to describe. NicoMan got what I was trying to say.
I use Photoshop a lot, and so when I used the word "resolution", I was thinking in terms of ppi (pixels per inch), not pixel dimensions for the screen (1024 x 768, etc). When you think in terms of ppi, the greater the number, the more image data can be resolved in a given area. Right now we are pretty limited in terms of how we can use higher ppi resolutions: namely, things just get crammed into a smaller real-world area on the screen. If you use a CRT, as has been pointed out, you can change the resolution to take advantage of this real-world size change. LCDs are not as flexible, as has also been pointed out. Go lower than the native resolution and things get fuzzy. Can't go over the native resolution.
So if the LCD resolution on your Powerbook is fixed, you can only get the flexiblity of a CRT by being able to adjust the pixel dimensions of GUI elements. I mentioned icons before as it's an example we can see now. Open your home directory, view it as Icons, then go to View Options. Drag the size up to 128. The pictures on the folders suddenly have a lot more detail you can see. Now I usually leave the size at 48 on my 19" CRT at 1600x1200. I could make it smaller, but at 32x32 pixels your back to OS 9 detail. If my monitor had twice the ppi size, I could make them be the same size on the screen at 96, in which case they'd be sharper than before; at 48 they'd be smaller yet still the same level of detail. Plus I have all the sizess in between to play around with.
Now if Apple can do size changes for icons in small, 4 pixel increments, why can't they do the same with every GUI element: scrollbars, buttons, text, etc.? The difficulty would come in making things scale in relation to eachother when needed (e.g. text in buttons). Font size in points is a real world measurement, not a pixel measurement. So in some ways it's kind of silly for a 12pt font to get smaller when you change the ppi of a monitor. We've learned how to use this to our advantage, but isn't necessarily logical to the average user.
In conclusion, higher ppi screens means you can have either more screen real estate, with everything smaller on the screen, or things the same size but much sharper. Either way it sounds better to me than current resolutions (especially on the 14" iBook, and 15" iMac). A 1024 x 768 video game is never going to be optimal on a 15" Powerbook or any of the widescreen Macs. Either have black edges on the sides or you have to use non-native resolution.
