Resolution Independence Support in Snow Leopard?

[shawnce]

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

Note that most Mac Pro systems ship with adapters that can drive two 30" displays without issue for many uses (of course 3D gaming, etc. taxes this).

In the next couple of years we will have the GPU hardware to run something like a 30" cinema display at quadruple its current pixel count (2x resolution) at a reasonable price point. The main thing left missing is the connector technology (display port is bandwidth limited and UDI stalled) and robust OS / application support... and of course the displays.

2010 is looking reasonable IMHO

 

[decksnap]

There is one thing that some people forget about vectors. If the vector is too complex, it is actually more efficient to use a bitmap. I don't think 100% vector means anything. I believe for certain graphics there will still be bitmaps supplied, and in many cases, they will look better.

I am still confused about how the internet will be displayed on high resolution monitors. A 72 dpi web image or interface graphic will look like garbage spread across a larger amount of pixels than it was intended for.

 

[crees!]

You can simplify it further for those people who just want the bare facts.

Presently the OS GUI is represented as bitmap images.

Resolution Independence will vectorize the OS GUI.

Think as it this way presently the GUI is a Photoshop images, and what is trying to do is make it into an Illustrator image. This way it scale without losing clarity.

Try explaining that to someone who doesn't know what a bitmap or vector is. The most straightforward would be, you don't need your reading glasses anymore.

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.

That's why hardcoding in general is bad.

 

[shawnce]

There is one thing that some people forget about vectors. If the vector is too complex, it is actually more efficient to use a bitmap. I don't think 100% vector means anything. I believe for certain graphics there will still be bitmaps supplied, and in many cases, they will look better.

It is relatively trivial to rasterize vector based artwork (NSImage already does this) to the current UI resolution once and use the rasterized form after that to avoid rendering performance overhead.

I am still confused about how the internet will be displayed on high resolution monitors.

Apple is also concerned...

http://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/
http://webkit.org/blog/56/high-dpi-part-2/

 

[ejstembler]

There is one thing that some people forget about vectors. If the vector is too complex, it is actually more efficient to use a bitmap. I don't think 100% vector means anything. I believe for certain graphics there will still be bitmaps supplied, and in many cases, they will look better.

Most vector-display engines actually cache the vector as a bitmap internally until it is resized or scaled. Then it is re-drawn and chached again. This makes it very fast.

I don't think we'll ever see bitmaps phased out entirely; though I'd like to see that happen. However, for non-glyph UI elements, vectors are the way to go...

 

[decksnap]

Apple is also concerned...

http://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/
http://webkit.org/blog/56/high-dpi-part-2/

Interesting... but it only affirms what I thought. If it's in the hands of site developers, it will be many years before the majority of the internet will look good on a high dpi screen.

 

[ltldrummerboy]

This sounds good. Thanks for explaining exactly what resolution independence is.

 

[llahsram]

For simple artwork, yes, vectors will save size and be scalable to very high resolutions. But for the detailed artwork we see in most icons on Mac OS X, the vector art can be enormous, extremely expensive in computation, and less scalable -- especially to smaller sizes, where it tends to get muddy compared to hand-crafted pixel artwork.

The Iconfactory's Craig Hockenberry posted on this a while back, with the CandyBar icon as an example. While in theory the vector art could be scalable to any resolution, it's absurd to be storing and rendering that much vector data from a practical standpoint. It's just not necessary.

There are some things that vectors are well suited for, and other things they are not. A fully raster-based approach has limitations, but a fully vector-based approach does too. This is why Mac OS X supports both vectors and multi-resolution images to implement high DPI support: both are useful, depending on the artwork.

 

[bobertoq]

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.

That'd be awesome

 

[Rocketman]

Resolution independence in today's parlance is vector graphics with different scaling factors for each screen element.

Back in the early 90's there was a fractal demonstration application for Mac that was downloadable from some FTP site. You could zoom into a complex biological shape to an extreme degree.

Where is fractal technology as connected to resolution independence and why, oh why, was fractal technology ofg the 90's applied to graphics generally? It actually rocked.

Rocketman

 

[TheNorthWaves]

I won't purchase snow leopard for my mac mini. It came with leopard and I occasionally wanted to switch to the Tiger discs I had.
Snow leopard will probably be on the Macbook Air Gen II that I buy in my 3rd year of med school to replace the idiot Lenovo T61 laptop they made us buy.

But until then, I'll watch the forums. I hope it is faster than Leopard is - Tiger was so quick, so flawless. At least in its later 10.4.x's
Apple needs to focus on stability. I hope they remember what made them so popular - they were better than windows. Hopefully they won't forget what made the underdog begin to rise up.

 

[benpatient]

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.

look up "indesign back channel" and follow the first link. Adobe has worked with Apple to fix the catastrophic problems that some Leopard users have with CS3 that cannot be fixed short of buying a new machine, and Apple has told adobe that they aren't doing anything wrong, that Apple needs to implement some changes to 10.5, and that it will happen "eventually." That was public knowledge when 10.5.1 was the current release. One of the smaller Nav Services bugs was patched with 10.5.3. There are still several more unresolved. The word Tim used on his blog was "no trivial" changes that Apple needs to make to meet their own development spec. Since this problem can happen on an 08 Mac Pro (and it has to me), and 08 Mac Pro's don't officially support 10.4 in any capacity, if you get one of these bugs with CS3, then you're just flat out of luck. I did eventually fix my problem, but it required throwing away the Apple-supplied hard drive and installing CS3 on another one that i got from Newegg. Apple tested the drive and found nothing wrong with it, but formatting it to all zeros and reinstalling CS3 didn't stop the random, frequent InDesign crashes on save/close/place. there is currently "no timeframe" for these fixes. Of course for all I know, the timeframe for the fixes is 10.6, next year, for $$$.

and the iphone can go jump off a bridge.

 

[akac]

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...

The ignorance shown in these posts is incredible.

Resolution Independence
First of all, RI is in Leopard now and it works wonderfully. It has nothing to do with the Zoom feature. Zoom will never use RI in real-time for many reasons. I have used apps that are 100% full RI in Leopard. The operating system and AppKit, etc... supports RI 100% in Leopard today. It works. What is not supported yet are thousands of applications that just look bad when RI is on. Even most of the built in apps don't look good, though they've gotten better with each point release. I've used Leopard in RI mode for a few days last year. It was usable.

ZFS ZFS was never a Leopard feature. Meaning Apple never said - oh one of the great features of Leopard is ZFS. Somebody posted about ZFS in the seeds when they found that leopard had read support and when Apple posted a read/write update for Leopard for people to test. But its never been a Leopard "feature". Believe me you don't want a file system to be put in too early. Its good Apple is first putting it in Server. That means Client may not get ZFS in the UI until 10.7 just like HFS+ Journaling didn't show up until a few releases later.

And the *bs* about OS X being second class and its all because of the iPhone is pure *bs*. Its because of the iPhone that all these great new tech like OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch and QuickTime X are coming to OS X. Its because of the need to optimize things much more that Snow Leopard is getting an overhaul in its ability to handle future computing.

The vast problem I see on these boards and it drives me *crazy* is how people who have no idea how computing works make opinions and comments that make no sense in the real world, but then get spouted by other people who don't have a clue as fact. Of course the beauty of the Macintosh is that people can use it effectively and efficiently without knowing anything about how they work, but then you get people who read Rumour sites and start taking everything there as gospel, you get people who think that stripping PPC binaries will make OS X and its apps use less RAM or run faster, and many other fabricated ideas with no basis in reality.

So to sum it up. RI is not a user technology. Its in Leopard. It works now. Unfortunately most apps don't look so hot with it on. Here is a screenshot with it set to 2.00 and 1.25 settings and iChat. ZFS you won't see in OS X until 10.7. Its in 10.6 Server only.

 

[Joe The Dragon]

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.



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.

they should copy windows and put something in that windows has had for years the uninstall list / CPL.

mac apps install less carp but some still add stuff to the system.

 

[bobertoq]

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.

I don't see why they couldn't do that. I didn't know about SVG's until I read this post. Now... I have a Firefox logo that is over 500x500 it wouldn't let me zoom in any further

 

[Digital Skunk]

It's about time Apple Innovated... if it comes

Tasty indeed. After using the hi-def 17" MBP anything smaller won't due. Having so much room on the display is wonderful, so being able to get the same kind of display on a 13" Air would be nice.

 

[VaDor]

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.

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.

Looks like EOF is being used more and more.

I wonder... isn't that creating the "Mac dll" , because at some point how could I know which framework is being use by applications or not so I can clear what is making garbage ??

 

[stephenli]

Resolution independence in OS X has become analogous to the removal of the Registry in Windows.

I hope that only the first one happens.

ha ha ha. funny.
I think there should be some new features on boot camp, say...to magnify...

long waiting for resolution independence!!!
It would be perfect for 1920 x 1080 display on Macbook Pro,
4k2k for 32" cinema display (panel currently avaliable? im not sure)
FWVGA(854 x 480) for iPhone 3 Gen.

 

[chilibball]

Zfs

ZFS, now were talkin'
I read about it on wikipedia and its amazing!

 

[Crazyroar]

I dont understand, what exactly is this feature? and do you need a seprate screen to get the use this feature?

 

[bobertoq]

I dont understand, what exactly is this feature? and do you need a seprate screen to get the use this feature?

This means Apple has found a way to resize images without distortion (e.g. http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/images/Magnifier2.png) so now, we can have high DPI (300 DPI! -- dots per inch) and the OS will resize the graphics so they are not to small.

So that menu bar will not be half a millimeter tall on that 300 DPI screen.

Why do you need a separate screen? You don't, but if you want 300 DPI, you do.

 

[tsice19]

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!

+1

 

[yankeedoodle]

I thought Leopard already has Resolution Independence?
Leopard should've had this feature standard. Apple is sure greedy for money.

Leopard did infact introduce this feature in the Developer Kits. In the docs coming with it, Apple states that users should consider using even higher-resolution bitmaps to accomodate the flexibility in screen scaling. So this feature is not going to save any memory -- at least not until developers switch to vector graphic formats.

 

[Pipian]

If I were to wager a guess, all Apple did to get the file sizes down was remove the unessential designable.nib files from each .nib bundle included in the applications it's distributing. The sample case listed in the link illustrates that removing the designable.nib files from Mail.app alone saved 11.3MB. If you take into account that the files they're showing have multiple localizations (18, in the case of Mail.app), and you could EASILY cut 200MB from Mail.app.

And what do you know: 287MB - 200MB = 87MB (just 10MB shy of quoted figure for Mail.app in Snow Leopard.)

I'm sure you'd find likewise for the other apps.

EDIT: Here's a better explanation with more examples. Seems to me that this is exactly what they did.

 

[MacFly123]

QUOTE FROM APPLE INSIDER: "Apple is putting the finishing touches on a complete multi-touch framework that will ship as part of Snow Leopard."

I was wondering if Apple would really let Microsoft screw things up in the industry with their pathetic implementation of Multi-Touch in Windows 7.

Good to see that Apple is going to keep leading the way! I am excited about Snow Leopard and yes I would pay $129 for it

Multi-Touch, ZFS, Multi-Core Foundation, RI, Much Smaller Footprint, Full Exchange Support. That is not a list of features to be taken lightly!