Resolution Independant Display

[michaelrjohnson]

I've been hearing about Resolution Independant Display, and would really like to learn more about it. What is the problem it solves? How is it accomplished technically? What does it ential? What are the benefits? etc... I've read that it will be fully functional in Leopard, so it will be something to look forward to.

I'm hoping some of the technophiles will be able to provide some interesting information (as a search didn't help much).

Thank you very much in advance!

 

[Lacero]

Install Developer tools to test drive it. It's still a little rough but looks promising enough.

 

[pdpfilms]

Install Developer tools to test drive it. It's still a little rough but looks promising enough.

for those who don't want to go developer-deep, could you explain exactly what it is or answer the above questions?

 

[robbieduncan]

Resolution independant display stuff has been present in Quartz since 10.0. It has been improved over time and Apple have official notified developers to start preparing for it so as when 10.5 rolls round your apps won't break.

Why is it needed? Well it lets you break free of the assumption that your screen is 72dpi. Lets say that you buy a high resolution display (say a 19" LCD running at a currently mad 2560x2048). You would not want to run at native resolution as everything would be tiny! You also would not be happy running at half that (the normal 1280x1024) as all those extra pixels would be wasted. With a resolution independant UI you can run at a virtual 1280x1024 (a scaling factor of 2) and put all those extra pixels to work making the displayed image sharper. I was going to post an example of this in the programming forum when get home, I'll link to that post from here when I do.

Note that you can also shrink the size to get more on the display, although it all looks a little less sharp.

 

[Lacero]

Resolution Independent displays unlock the dependency between a displays resolution to that of the UI. I don't see many benefits for the average computer user, however I can see it being used in the medical and hi-tech industries where ultra-high resolution displays are required.

Basically, every element in the GUI would have to be vectorized, apart from shadows and gradients which would be dynamically created on output. Vectorized elements does open up a number of intriguing possibilities including new UI animated effects that are not bound by a series of animated graphics and display zooms that retain sharpness.

 

[robbieduncan]

I have posted an example of how controls can scale here.

 

[michaelrjohnson]

Thanks robbieduncan! That's a great foray into RID.

 

[MisterMe]

Resolution Independent displays unlock the dependency between a displays resolution to that of the UI. I don't see many benefits for the average computer user, however I can see it being used in the medical and hi-tech industries where ultra-high resolution displays are required.

....

I don't think that this is the way to look at it. The resolution independent display is part of the natural evolution of the GUI. Remember that the original Mac used 1-bit color (black and white) at 72 dpi. Today, we would recoil in horror if presented with such a primative display. In five years, we will look back on our current displays and wonder what was Apple thinking. Tempus fugit.