I know that resolution independence makes it possible to scale an image up without having it become pixelated, but I was just curious how this would help me directly if it was ever incorporated in OS X... I use the zoom function a lot (crtl + touchpad) when reading articles and viewing small pictures, in the expense that it becomes pixelated. Would resolution independence work in this scenario?
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A question about Resolution Independence
- Thread starter superspiffy
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Resolution independence.
Pictures you find on the internet or take with a digital camera will still pixelate when you zoom in.
But the GUI will stay sharp.
Pictures you find on the internet or take with a digital camera will still pixelate when you zoom in.
But the GUI will stay sharp.
Thanks I've actually read that article before but now I understand that the GUI will only be affected but the subject matter at hand (a picture) will still be pixelated. Then I have to ask... what good is it for? Why do I need the buttons and scroll bars to look nice when I'm zooming in for the text/image?
It means that we can have screens that are super high resolution without having everything look super small.
The UI on screens with different amounts of pixels per inch can be the same in real dimensions (but the higher PPI monitors will look more detailed).
Does that make sense?
Yep... this is exactly what its for. In that Apple (and others) plans on releasing super high resolution screens. So instead of 100 dpi, they may be 300 dpi (dots per inch). If they did that without any change in software, your icons and scroll bars would be 3x smaller, or really pixelated.
arn
There are two cases where you really need the resolution independence: if you have a really high-resolution monitor (if you've tried some of the recent high-end laptop screens, the text and things are too small for comfort) and if you have a problem with your eyes (in which case even a fairly normal screen makes things look to small to see clearly). In either case, you want everything to look bigger, including buttons and scroll bars, so they're easy to use.
Basically, the whole point is to make everything on the screen bigger without losing quality. Apple have made almost all of the interface in leopard so that it can be bigger without getting blurry (which is why the icons are now massive), and text will always look good.
Things like photos and most web graphics will always blur though, because the picture is stored as different coloured dots, rather than a description of the shape. Make dots bigger, and you just get big dots, not more detail, and you either get big coloured squares, or you blur it. There are ways of making a photo bigger without it blurring, but they're generally slow, and never that good (because you can't fill in the gaps between the dots without knowing what's really there - you can only guess).
Resolution independence is there in leopard, but it's not really finished yet. You can turn it on (if you have the developer tools installed), and some things will work fine, others (like the finder) look pretty buggy. It's usable though.
Basically, the whole point is to make everything on the screen bigger without losing quality. Apple have made almost all of the interface in leopard so that it can be bigger without getting blurry (which is why the icons are now massive), and text will always look good.
Things like photos and most web graphics will always blur though, because the picture is stored as different coloured dots, rather than a description of the shape. Make dots bigger, and you just get big dots, not more detail, and you either get big coloured squares, or you blur it. There are ways of making a photo bigger without it blurring, but they're generally slow, and never that good (because you can't fill in the gaps between the dots without knowing what's really there - you can only guess).
Resolution independence is there in leopard, but it's not really finished yet. You can turn it on (if you have the developer tools installed), and some things will work fine, others (like the finder) look pretty buggy. It's usable though.
Tiger was supposed to have full resolution independence. It's available if you install the developer tools in Tiger or Leopard, and it's much improved in Leopard. But there are still too many issues and incompatibilities, so it's disabled by default.
"resolution independence is still a developer-only feature in Mac OS X v10.5 and is not yet intended for end-user adoption."
from http://developer.apple.com/document...verview/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html
The last thing I heard is that sometime in 2008 it would become usable?