Re: Native res
Originally posted by Bradcoe
Native resolution sucks on LCD's. I hate not being able to change it. I want the maximum resolution that will fit, but Mr. Joe might want something a little less for his own eyes, but then Mr. Joe has to look at a horrible screen when it's not running in native. This is the LCD's one downfall. The ability to adjust the resolution to a lower one should be improved so it looks nicer. THEN sell a 1600x1200 laptop display.
Well, a 1600x1200 display will look nice in two resolutions, at least: 1600x1200 and 800x600 (double-sized pixels).
Hoping for anything better in other rezolutions is not a very reasonable goal.
Yes, with realtime antialiasing you should be able to do it, but the simpler solution (from a processing point of view) would be on-demand resizing of all UI widgets (there is nothing saying that a scroll bar *has* to be 32 pixels across, you know!) and fonts and images in Quartz. Would have roughly the same effect, but you'd spend much less processing power doing it (widgets only need to be resized once and then drawn over and over again; at the GPU layer there would be no indication that scroll bar X and Y are really the same thing and so the scaling doesn't really need to be repeated ...) and you would get fewer artifacts introduced and more discrete detail retained than compositing everything in, say, 1024x768 and scaling as a continuous-tone image up to the LCD's native resolution. The difference for non-bitmapped stuff would be dramatic (think a line drawn on an old 320x240 screen compared to a line of the same physical size on a new 1600x1200 screen ...)
But, unfortunately, while OSX has a nice icon scaling system, I've never heard any mention of wholesale replacement of screen geometries in it's API set. It's a shame, because many people run their computers at a low resolution just so that certain UI elements are a larger "target" to hit, but have to live with the ugly screen and eye strain side effects of inch-tall pixels.
