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Resolution Independence in Leopard?
- Thread starter icecone
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I'm still tryin to figure that one out myself. People say its there, but not functional. Or it's there and functional, but serves no real purpose since nothing uses it. Blah 
Apple first announced it in 2006, in about August I think. The announcement said something like "this will be ready to go in about 18 months". So maybe it'll be coming in a point upgrade in early 2008.
In computing, resolution independence is the concept that elements on a computer screen can be drawn at sizes independent from the pixel grid?
WOW! I should've known. Thanks...
In computing, resolution independence is the concept that elements on a computer screen can be drawn at sizes independent from the pixel grid?
WOW! I should've known. Thanks...
Are you still seriously confused? That's as good as the explanation is gonna get.
Elements on the screen, such as a button or the menu bar, remain the same size no matter how many pixel per inch your display can output. The only difference is that everything is going to be crisper on a display that has more pixel density.
Without resolution independence going from a 72dpi monitor to a 144ppi would make everything in Mac OS X look 4 times smaller.
Without resolution independence:
at 72 dpi
at 144 dpi
With resolution independence:
at 72 dpi
at 144 dpi (this apple would look crisper on a 144 dpi display even though its the same size as the 72 dpi display)
With resolution independence you could also theoretically scale the user interface to make elements bigger than they are currently without losing crispness.
at normal scale
at 200% scale (still crisp and not pixelated as it would be under 10.4's screen zoom feature)
essentially, if you scale up any of the elemnts at the moment, you get big coloured squares making up the image, and it looks really gross. (and is really hard to use)
apple worked with jeff han (see here) and others for the multi touch on the iphone, and although i personally think it's years before we see a touch screen interface on a desktop computer, resolution independance is leading in that direction, to make the transition as smooth as possible. the scaling stuff going on in the video that i've linked to uses some resolution independance to make it work out.
apple used a similar approach when moving to the intel chips. 10.0 worked on intel, but it wasn't until 10.4 that the transition actually happened. so when it did happen, all the guys chained to their desks at apple had already been coding on intel and getting it to play nice with ppc a lá rosetta for several years. so there were not very many issues, really.
apple worked with jeff han (see here) and others for the multi touch on the iphone, and although i personally think it's years before we see a touch screen interface on a desktop computer, resolution independance is leading in that direction, to make the transition as smooth as possible. the scaling stuff going on in the video that i've linked to uses some resolution independance to make it work out.
apple used a similar approach when moving to the intel chips. 10.0 worked on intel, but it wasn't until 10.4 that the transition actually happened. so when it did happen, all the guys chained to their desks at apple had already been coding on intel and getting it to play nice with ppc a lá rosetta for several years. so there were not very many issues, really.
If they're saying they're not ready until next year, I expect the way to do it until they make it a user-enabled feature (hopefully with a maintenance update) is to do it the same way one does it in Tiger: go to the Quartz Debug.app developer tool and crank up the User Interface Resolution.
There's no guarantee that Resolution Independence will be a user feature either. It might simply end up being that if you plug in a high-dpi display, the tech kicks in and scales the UI accordingly.
Yeah dude, that's exatly why people buy those huge high dpi monitors, to lose real estate.
again, I see how this would be good for people who suck at seeing, sorry I mean visually impaired, but for everyone else?
kudos on the good explanation, though.
It's not just for people who suck as seeing. The new iPod Nano screen is over 200 dpi - that's around three times the standard 72dpi screens are assumed to be. If screen elements are one third the size they're supposed to be, we'll ALL have trouble using them.
Try it for yourself... take a screengrab, load it into Preview, and set the scale to 33%. Even though it would be crisper on a high dpi screen, that's the size it would be. Reading stuff at that size would challenge us all, as would things like clicking buttons, using menus, etc.
It is not only for high-dpi displays. It is also very useful if you want everything on the screen to be just bigger, but without any loss in quality. Once you're in your forties, you will understand.
This is why it will take some time, luckily there are some solutions:
[1] Obviously typefaces are no problem, they scale to any size.
[2] SVG (vector) graphics can be used in some instances. Again, these scale nicely.
[3] At the WWDC presentation they also talked of the possibility of web servers holding high def and standard def images, then serving up the appropriate version depending on the screen resolution of the client.
oh man, I am so glad I didn't pursue my web design career if that is going to be the future haha