Blurry Launchpad Icons in ML on MBA

[cdf]

When I installed Mountain Lion on my 2011 11'' MacBook Air today, I knew something was just not right. The icons in Launchpad seemed slightly out of focus. In comparison, Lion had larger, but more importantly, crisper icons.

Similar remarks have been made by others in the OS X forum:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1395258/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1411872/

But I would like to get some feedback from 11'' MBA users, especially regarding the following interesting observation: On an external 1920x1080 display, the icons are bigger and sharper. So perhaps the blurriness is due to resolution. Indeed, scaling the MBA display from 1366x768 to 1024x768 makes the icons crisp. The screengrabs below illustrate this. Look carefully, the difference is slight, but it is there.


(1366x768)......................................(1024x768)

Can anybody confirm this on their MBA?

 

[atMac]

Have you tried playing with your brightness? Some reason my dock looks crisp, but with LaunchPad they look blurry unless I crank up the brightness.

 

[cdf]

Even at full brightness, I still see a difference between the two resolutions: for the native resolution, the Launchpad icons remain a little blurry. The dock, however, is fine.

 

[Nova Sensei]

The difference is very obvious, even to my fuzzywuzzy eyes.

 

[cdf]

Also, this was for a clean install of Mountain Lion. Anyone with an upgrade install care to chime in?

 

[kodeman53]

Also, this was for a clean install of Mountain Lion. Anyone with an upgrade install care to chime in?

WHAT!?!?!? I thought clean installs solved all problems? What is this world coming too?

I did an upgrade. The icons on Launchpad and the Dock look the same, clean, crisp and snappier.

 

[cdf]

Update: I re-imaged Lion and did an upgrade install of Mountain Lion. But the Launchpad icons are still blurry (as in the image originally posted) for the native resolution of my 11'' MBA. Is this really just an isolated issue, or is nobody actually noticing this?

 

[Time Less]

13" here and ML launchpad icons are indeed less sharp. maybe it's just me but they appear bigger too.

 

[mark574020]

Same here on my 13" have the samsung screen to

 

[cdf]

I finally have an update on this. With the dock positioned at the bottom, making the dock smaller (by clicking on the separator bar and moving the pointer down) makes the launchpad icons crisp again. There seems to be a threshold on how large the dock can be.

Conclusion: The blurriness of the launchpad icons on the 11'' MBA is probably due to some scaling needed to fit not only launchpad and the dock, but also the search field at the top of launchpad, a feature that was added in ML.