Resolution Independence Support in Snow Leopard?

[ChrisH3677]

I want font categorization

Please!! Give me automatic font categorization or tagging. And then let apps be able to use those categories. So for instance, I can search in the font inspector for fonts that are categorized (or tagged) sans serif. I psses me off having to scroll thru every font to find a suitable font.

 

[!¡ V ¡!]

I love that people bitch that they will HAVE to pay $129 for it, or that apple is greedy because they didnt put it in Leopard.

You know guys, they struggled to release leopard on time (after the first delay), they pulled several features out at the last minute because they didnt work right! You are not required to buy Leopard or Snow Leopard so you dont HAVE to pay $129. On top of that you dont know how much snow leopard is going to cost. it could be a $30 upgrade, or free for leopard users. You simply do not know!

The problem with rumors are that sometimes people believe them regardless of credibility. ZFS and Resolution Independence was NOT EVER promised by apple to be in Leopard.

Stop bitching and just wait to see what happens please!

Who is complaining, these features could have been one of the 300+ that promised. Since the list of the 300 were posted online, there is always that + issue that was added by

marketing and focusing on other things rather than prioritize and running on a thin staff. Some one at is bad at project management and manning.

 

[coolshoes]

no ppc code

The more likely reason everything has shrunk so much is that the new OS will be intel-only and all the binaries can be intel-only instead of universal.

Don't you think?

 

[Object-X]

When oh when will we get new monitors?

Does this mean we have to wait another year for a monitor refresh?

 

[kabunaru]

The more likely reason everything has shrunk so much is that the new OS will be intel-only and all the binaries can be intel-only instead of universal.

Don't you think?

I do think Snow Leopard will be Intel-only but that doesn't mean your PPC Mac will stop working when Snow Leopard is released. Leopard should be good enough for most PPC users.

 

[!¡ V ¡!]

Does this mean we have to wait another year for a monitor refresh?

30" is not enough for you.

 

[nagromme]

Does this mean we have to wait another year for a monitor refresh?

If you mean DPI so high that today's UI would be a problem, then probably so. It's possible res-independence could come before Snow Leopard, but I'm betting not. (Minor display changes (new backlights, new cases) could come at any time though.)

Res-independence has been "almost done" for some time (even Tiger had it), but the reason I fear it won't happen soon is that I almost never hear about app developers working with it. And without good 3rd-party app support, it's not much of a feature.

It's one I've been looking forward to for a very long time though! So I hope that every app developer has been quietly planning for it.

30" is not enough for you.

I for one want 32" But I think what he means is, the same SIZE display may be fine, but with res-independence, much higher DPI can be used, resulting in the same size text and details, only far sharper.

So... how about a 30" Cinema Display running at 3584 x 2400, say?

 

[bugfaceuk]

um...the "groundwork" was included in Tiger, not Leopard.

It should have been completely implemented in Leopard.

It was originally supposed to be fully functional in Tiger.

A certain OS developer is looking more and more like a certain other OS developer as their complacency grows...I'll believe Apple is going to actually use resolution independence when i zoom in on my screen and everything doesn't go fuzzy and lame.

They could have turned this on for the 1st party and core services a long time ago. It could even have happened in a point update.

My parents can't use my laptop because the dpi is too high and the resolution is decidedly NOT independent.

Don't get me wrong, if it's finally included, I'll be happy. I'm just going to be really, really annoyed if I have to pay 129 dollars for 10.6 if all the "new features" are things like RI and ZFS and other stuff that we should have had with 10.5. I think Apple was planning on doing a lot more with 10.5 and they got behind because they didn't put enough resources into it, and instead of having all that Vista mud kicked back in their faces with 18 months or more of delays to leopard, they just cut back on the real core work and concentrated on the "features" for 10.5, holding off on the real meat and potatoes upgrades, rewrites and structural changes because they didn't have time to pull it off without looking stupid. I don't think Apple has been putting as much into their computer OS as they have been into their mobile OS.

We have been relegated to second citizen status. notice how much they will add to a point release (10.5.4) for their mobile users (all this mobileme stuff), but they can't be bothered to fix the problems between Leopard and CS3 that have been documented and isolated as apple problems for over 6 months.

I thought creative professionals were the backbone of Apple's business? Now it's ipods and iphones. sure, they'll make more money, but it's a very slippery slope they're on now...

Oh come on, you are confusing "supposed to be in Tiger according to some rumours" with "Apple planned to deliver it in Tiger".

As some who uses CS3 every hour of every day to make a living, on Leopard, I've had nothing more serious than glitches which to be honest, given it's only CS3 that's doing it, I lay the blame at Adobe's door. All that said, it's nothing that has stopped me being as productive as ever and has certainly never lost me work.

Would I pay for more efficient use of my disk space, more efficient use of memory, 16TB of addressable space, and faster running apps? I can state, as a creative professional, that this would be a fantastic release. Faster, smaller, more stable.

If some of this is a result of the iPhone, then bring it on.

 

[bugfaceuk]

The more likely reason everything has shrunk so much is that the new OS will be intel-only and all the binaries can be intel-only instead of universal.

Don't you think?

Almost certainly, hopefully they are being smarter with languages as well. I also suspect there may be some re-factoring into shared libraries, or stripping things out that used to be unique to applications that are now provided in one of the various frameworks.

 

[Yuppi]

Programs that only use Apple provided components are already resolution independent (RI), or will become it automatically. The reason Apple can't just say: "Everything is RI, starting from today" are programs that draw parts of their user interface themselves.
For example CS4 with their new toolbar that is not available from Apple in this way. Currently they do some calculations. An example:
Draw 2 rectangles beside each other. Each is 40*40. If the user clicks in the right one X will happen, if he clicks on the left one Y will happen. This is translated into: If the mouse position is bigger than 40 do X else do Y.
With RI everything becomes uneven numbers. For example with a display that has a pixel density that is 1.12 times higher. The decision for choosing the right action needs to be:
if the mouse position is bigger than 44.8 then do X else do Y. And most programs are not prepared for that. For them one pixel they draw is one pixel on the screen. With RI one pixel they draw could be 1.12 pixels on the screen. Mouse positions are suddenly real valued numbers instead of integers.

That is why RI is breaking some applications that draw their user interface (UI) at least partly themselves. Especially those that set single pixels are kind of lost. And those are far more than you would expect.
So it is not really Apples fault that there is no RI yet, but also because of compatibility.

How hard it is to create an RI UI can easily be seen when you press ctrl + + in the browser.

 

[ejstembler]

Doubtful

I like to differentiate support for high DPI's and true Resolution Independence as two separate but related items. And when speaking of user interfaces, in my opinion, true resolution independence is only achieved if UI elements are 100% vectors.

Sure Mac OS X has had support for higher DPI's since 10.4 but it is still a long way off from being truly resolution independent (i.e. vector driven instead of raster driven). Just take a look at the resource package contents of any Apple or 3rd party app and you'll see the heavy reliance on bitmaps (i.e. TIFFs and PNGs). App developers would have to convert to vector-based images such as PDFs or whatever vector format Apple decides to rely upon.

Take a look at Microsoft's WPF and Silverlight. Their UI elements are 100% vector-based and also 100% template-able. Meaning any UI you create is 100% resolution independent and customizable. Microsoft even created a nice, new xml-based format xaml to declaratively describe UI elements.

As a software developer/microISV, I'd like to see Apple come up with something similar which is also truly 100% resolution independent.

 

[bobertoq]

I wonder what this will do to font rendering... maybe soon monitors will display print quality font rendering! ahh I can dream, can't I?

Now how exactly does this Resolution Independence Day thing work?

 

[kabunaru]

So... how about a 30" Cinema Display running at 3584 x 2400, say?

What about a 32" Cinema Display running at 3840x2400 (2x the 1920x1200 resolution) and a 40" Cinema Display running at 5120x3200 resolution (2x the 2560x1600 resolution)?
Also, just imagine Crysis maxed out at those resolutions...

 

[jmooring]

Level of user control over interface elements

Thinking about the way you can currently scale icons in OS X, I wonder how much control we'll have over scaling the other elements of a vector-based GUI? Apple tends to have very strong opinions about what looks best and this could mean ceding some of that control to users. This is going to be very interesting...

 

[ChrisA]

I don't think res independence has much to do with app size.......
I'd say bigger factors are probably reduction of unnecessary language resources, Xcode changes (compiling to smaller, more efficient executables), and/or the dropping of the PPC half of Universal Binaries. (Counteracted in part, maybe, by some apps having dual binaries for 32- and 64-bit CPUs.)

All you'd need to see drastic reductions in size is a "smart installer". Even if the binaries where identical if the instaler only coped the "corect" binary code (either Intel or PPC but not both) ad the lenaguages that you selected

 

[shawnce]

What about a 32" Cinema Display running at 3840x2400 (2x the 1920x1200 resolution) and a 40" Cinema Display running at 5120x3200 resolution (2x the 2560x1600 resolution)?
Also, just imagine Crysis maxed out at those resolutions...

I don't need a 40" or 32" computer display. A 30" is more then enough of a surface to look around when sitting in front of a computer (I have one, well ok that and a couple secondary displays). What I do want is that same 30" display running at 288 DPI since I work on code most of the day. The crisper the text the better.

Also resolution independence has existed since 10.4 (buggy, much less buggy in 10.5) and it was NEVER promised as an end user visible feature (so far to date). In fact Apple really only made one semi-promise to developers regarding a timeline for resolution independent UI but I cannot say more about it because of NDA.

Apple has, since 10.4, recommended that developers use vector art work as it makes since in their products given the future will include high-dpi displays (also the iPhone is such a device).

Mac OS X v10.4 introduced preliminary support for resolution independence, but the implementation was very limited and many visual errors occur. Mac OS X v10.5 adds further support and the implementation has been refined. Most Cocoa applications, and Carbon applications that use compositing mode, should be capable of being resolution-independent when running on this release. However, resolution independence is still a developer-only feature in Mac OS X v10.5 and is not yet intended for end-user adoption.

http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsImaging/RN-ResolutionIndependentUI/index.html

http://developer.apple.com/document...verview/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html

For those not understanding why this will be a nice technology consider the following image...

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/HiDPIOverview/Art/hi_dpi.jpg

 

[jmadlena]

Correct. It has nothing to do with application sizes. Cocoa versions of those applications using/re-using shared cocoa frameworks by many applications will drastically move custom frameworks/libraries out of those applications and into the /Frameworks pathway.

So, would the shared cocoa frameworks be like DLLs? When an app is installed it would put the framework into a central location for all other apps to use?

Would this require installation wizards like on Windows, instead of merely dragging and dropping the app into a directory?

 

[bobertoq]

You would need a pretty good video card for a monitor of that high resolution.

 

[shawnce]

You would need a pretty good video card for a monitor of that high resolution.

Another reason why resolution independence hasn't yet gone "live"... the hardware side of things isn't really fully ready for it yet at reasonable prices (at least on the desktop).

 

[kabunaru]

Another reason why resolution independence hasn't yet gone "live"... the hardware side of things isn't really fully ready for it yet at reasonable prices (at least on the desktop).

Apple should include CrossFire and/or SLI support in Mac OS X in order to run a 5120x3200 resolution display...

 

[Me1000]

Who is complaining, these features could have been one of the 300+ that promised. Since the list of the 300 were posted online, there is always that + issue that was added by

marketing and focusing on other things rather than prioritize and running on a thin staff. Some one at is bad at project management and manning.

Marketing and development are two totally different departments. Apple is a massive company. The marketing guys have virtually nothing to do with the development guys.

The dev guys work their butts off on whatever project they are working on be it the iPhone or OS X. Leopard was delayed because they needed to finish up the iPhone software in prep for its launch. Their dev resource may have been spread thin, but it isnt like they can pull marketing guys and tell them to write code. It just doesn't work that way.

 

[guzhogi]

What about a 32" Cinema Display running at 3840x2400 (2x the 1920x1200 resolution) and a 40" Cinema Display running at 5120x3200 resolution (2x the 2560x1600 resolution)?
Also, just imagine Crysis maxed out at those resolutions...

Because DVI can't go that high. Neither does DisplayPort. I WikiPedia-ed different display connectors, and the highest res any connector supports is 2560x1600. Also, 5120x3200 is 4x as big as 2560x1600, since you're doubling both numbers. Plus, many Macs (MacBooks, Mac Mini, TV and I think iMac) can't even support 2560x1600.

All you'd need to see drastic reductions in size is a "smart installer". Even if the binaries where identical if the instaler only coped the "corect" binary code (either Intel or PPC but not both) ad the lenaguages that you selected

I agree. What I'd like to see is a smart installer/uninstaller/software update app. You can install all your apps that way, and also remove your apps (including any special files like Preferences and stuff in Library->Application Support), as well as update ALL of your apps, not just Apple apps. Also, have the option to buy/download/install apps from online. You can add plug-ins to different shops. With that, you can see all apps a store has, and also filter the list to only apps in which your computer meets the minimum requirements and then even recommended requirements, if they're given.

Something somewhat related to that is an integrated package receipt, Spotlight Importer, Exposé plug-in and software update plug-in. That way, your computer knows what file permissions a certain kind of file should have, be able to filter the files in Spotlight, use Exposé on the files, and have software update know where to look for updates.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

So, would the shared cocoa frameworks be like DLLs? When an app is installed it would put the framework into a central location for all other apps to use?

Would this require installation wizards like on Windows, instead of merely dragging and dropping the app into a directory?

The Shared Frameworks are already present and come from NeXTSTEP.

/Library/Frameworks/
/System/Library/Frameworks/
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/

Many of the current application bundles have their own frameworks (dylib) DLL get's it's origins from dynamically linked libraries and UNIX shared libraries.

NeXT/OS X, along with Solaris/OpenSolaris, FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD, Linux, Haiku, RISC OS, et.al., leverage shared libraries.

OS X has a dynamic run-time based hybrid kernel which they reference dylibs.

Instead of Apple's applications having custom shared libraries for every application bundle the more they incorporate Cocoa via Private or Public APIs the smaller their application executables [inside the wrappers/bundle] become as they are dynamically linked instead of statically-linked libraries.

They'll put them in PrivateFrameworks first and when they have matured the frameworks enough to a level of abstraction suitable for System-wide and general developer consumption they will move them to the Frameworks pathways.

 

[solipsism]

For those who still are confused by vector graphics right/option-click the Flash ad at the top or bottom of this page and zoom in a few times. You'll see that the test and images stay nice and crisp as it gets larger.

I wonder if Apple is going to include (Application) SVG icons. Work has been done on these icons in the early days of Leopard, but it seems Apple later pulled this. SVG icons would allow unlimited scaling, but it is a processor intensive technique.

If IR is included as the default I would think that they would, even though their current solution of having multiple sized icon images (16px^2, 32px^2, 128px^2, 256px^2, 512px^2) seems to work pretty well.

Dictionary going from 10MB -> 2MB tells me they have moved out a system-wide database for words to make it useable across all applications that are written to the framework in Cocoa that have the calls to leverage the RDBMS.

I was thinking the same thing regarding the massive app size reductions.

um...the "groundwork" was included in Tiger, not Leopard.

Any major update requires groundwork. This stuff doesn't get built in a day.

It should have been completely implemented in Leopard.

You can turn it on via Terminal without having developer tools installed.

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor x​

x = The magnitude larger or smaller you wish to make it. 1 is the default and normal resolution, 2 would make it 2x as large, .75 would reduce the default size by 25%. Get it? Try it out, you'll see that it wasn't close to being ready, which is a clear indication that it shouldn't have been turned on it Leopard. I bet it will be one of the last things Apple gets right in Snow Leopard, if it is on by default.

It was originally supposed to be fully functional in Tiger.

Just like ZFS was supposed to be fully functional in Leopard despite the glaring fact that it wasn't even a bootable file system and other major issues at the time? I'll need so proof that Apple stated that RI was coming in Tiger to believe that.

I'll believe Apple is going to actually use resolution independence when i zoom in on my screen and everything doesn't go fuzzy and lame.

I hope so, because I use screen zoom very often.

They could have turned this on for the 1st party and core services a long time ago. It could even have happened in a point update.

Turn it one yourself to see why it's not ready.

My parents can't use my laptop because the dpi is too high and the resolution is decidedly NOT independent.

My parents recently got a new imac after years of being on a WinPC. While the text is the approximate same size, going from a 15" display to 20" doesn't make it look awfully smaller. I tried the RI in Leopard, but there were too many things that didn't work right. I then tried changing from the native resolution. Apple should not even offer them in the Display area as they are useless. Anyway, they got accustomed to the larger screen. I did increase the text in Mail Preferences which worked well and I installed WebKit (now in Safari 4) so I could enable Full Page Zoom.

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDebugFullPageZoomPreferenceKey 1​

Note: You have to need have Safari 4 or a newer Webkit version.

I'm just going to be really, really annoyed if I have to pay 129 dollars for 10.6 if all the "new features" are things like RI and ZFS and other stuff that we should have had with 10.5.

You don't have to buy anything; and being on these board you'll know exactly what you'd be getting in 10.6 should you decide to buy. There is no reason to upgrade if you don't want or need what an OS is offering. Just check out Vista and people moving back to XP. I'd think people would be happy that Apple is trying to un-bloat their OS.

I don't think Apple has been putting as much into their computer OS as they have been into their mobile OS.

Not true. About 60% of the WWDC was developer classes were devoted to Mac OS X. The iPhone did cause some delay to Leopard, but it's also helped Apple with Leopard when they scaled down Leopard to put into the iPhone.

We have been relegated to second citizen status.

Most people who feel like 2nd-class citizens make a change, if they can. If you really feel that way then you can move to Window or Linux. There are no border patrol to stop you, no midnight curfews or underground railroads to traverse. Just switch your OS. You can even your same Mac HW to do it.

I thought creative professionals were the backbone of Apple's business? Now it's ipods and iphones. sure, they'll make more money, but it's a very slippery slope they're on now...

In 1986 that was teh case as it was the de facto standard for creative professionals, but that was because of the software. nowadays it's just a personal preference as they all have pros and cons. The average consumer, not the business sector, has been Apple's prime concern and these iPhone and iPod users (and the Apple Stores) ahv helped sell more Macs than ever. Apple is very concerned with this segment of their business, othewise they wouldn't be doing the things they are doing with Snow Leopard or Mobile Me.

 

[kabunaru]

Because DVI can't go that high. Neither does DisplayPort. I WikiPedia-ed different display connectors, and the highest res any connector supports is 2560x1600. Also, 5120x3200 is 4x as big as 2560x1600, since you're doubling both numbers.

Will this ever change in the future to support the higher resolutions I mentioned?