Resolution Independence Support in Snow Leopard?

[InkMaster]

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!

Now that just leaves the problem of what to use multitouch for

I mean stretched and flipping images is cool n all, but has anyone actually come up w/ a decent function for multitouch? I haven't seen ANYTHING... :/

 

[kockgunner]

can't wait for nice large vector images in coverflow!

 

[alpez]

One of the more interesting possibilities includes the introduction of full Resolution Independence.

Anyone know if the 'Resolution Independence' works for all Mac app's or the app must be built for 'Resolution Independence'

Tony
Cognitive, Stelvio Bokföring Lön för Macintosh
http://www.ct.se/

 

[nostaws]

Okay so one early poster asked about what is all the hubub about resolution independence, and he got a bunch of "what resolution independence is is..."

But that wasn't his question. It was more "who cares?"

After reading all the posts in this thread, I still don't have a compelling reason why I would need resolution independence. While I admit it would be cool, I don't see this changing the way too many people work.

In fact, a lot of the work people do is with raster/bitmap graphics whether they be photos, or video, etc.

So far the biggest change people are welcoming is a larger dock on larger screens. Whoo hooo!

 

[toughboy]

Now that just leaves the problem of what to use multitouch for

I mean stretched and flipping images is cool n all, but has anyone actually come up w/ a decent function for multitouch? I haven't seen ANYTHING... :/

Have you not watched "Minority Report"???

As they say: "Think Different.."

 

[arn]

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

They are refering to multi-touch trackpad support (in the MacBook Air and Pro), so a 3rd party app can use the zoom and three-finger swipe. Not full-multitouch like people are drooling over.

After reading all the posts in this thread, I still don't have a compelling reason why I would need resolution independence. While I admit it would be cool, I don't see this changing the way too many people work.

Resolution independence is required before Apple (and other companies) can practically introduce ultra-high-DPI monitors. There was a rumor of a 4520x2540 screen a while back coming from Apple.

And Apple referred to these future high-rez displays when describing this feature in the past.

Anyone know if the 'Resolution Independence' works for all Mac app's or the app must be built for 'Resolution Independence'

Apps need to be designed with it in mind.

arn

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Okay so one early poster asked about what is all the hubub about resolution independence, and he got a bunch of "what resolution independence is is..."

But that wasn't his question. It was more "who cares?"

After reading all the posts in this thread, I still don't have a compelling reason why I would need resolution independence. While I admit it would be cool, I don't see this changing the way too many people work.

In fact, a lot of the work people do is with raster/bitmap graphics whether they be photos, or video, etc.

So far the biggest change people are welcoming is a larger dock on larger screens. Whoo hooo!

Independent Zoom, over selection, amongst different target windows, across selected rectangles covering Text and imagery that will allow one to scale in.

Bitmapped images won't be changed.

As I stated before, until capture devices and displays have co-processors that manage all the dimensional aspects separate from any color interpolation to reproduce the imagery it's not something people will see how it can change computing.

If you can independent assign view port coordinates to varying dpi, color depth and field of view you truly can do some radical stuff. Forensics, Military surveillance and more comes to mind.

 

[SC68Cal]

The goal posts just keep moving farther down the field.........

 

[ablemac]

Resolution Independence: It's about the details

Wow! there's a whole lot of ignorance about RI in the previous comments.

Resolution Independence (RI) is all about SCALE of the User Interface (UI). Both Raster and Vector graphics are used in Apple's RI implementation for excelent reasons.

RI has one user accessible control, and that's the Scale slider. It snaps into place at 1, 1.5, 2, and so on. This feature is not Final, nor is it officially announced.

In an RI environment, we talk about Units, not Pixels. When SCALE = 1, then 1 Unit = 1 Pixel. Apps that don't use the new RI aware programming methods are unaware of the true pixel resolution of the display, they only know the "unit resolution" of the display. So they're output is blocky compared to RI Apps, but no worse than they already are. In other words, you don't know what you're missing yet.

You can already change the SCALE of your display in a NON RI way by lowering the Resolution of your "Video Card" output. Then your text will be bigger, but not clearer. Keep in mind that "Bigger" is a perception, based mostly on distance. If you can't see all the detail on screen (if you're sitting far from the screen) then you may be able to get closer to the screen and see those details, or use OS X's Zoom feature (System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse / Mouse / Zoom) to enlarge part of the display. But once you see all the detail, getting closer, or enlarging it more, won't make it clearer, just bigger.

Here's how RI works. Lets say we double the resolution on a screen. Now we have twice as much space to place our windows and icons, but they are half the size they were. If our eyes are good enough, or we're close enough, we can see all this detail, and life is good. But if we need things to be larger in an RI enabled OS, we can increase the scale. To get back to the original "size" on the screen, we set the SCALE to 2. Now everything looks like it did on the original screen, with one difference. The system can display extra detail to sharpen what we're seeing. We may not be able to see all of that extra detail, but we can enjoy all that we are able to see, and now we can lean forward and see more. For many people, this will mean they can lean back and actually see comfortably. And I mean us normal people, not just folks who are legally blind.

Some images can be redesigned with Vector tools and they'll be smaller, and scale perfectly. However, some images need to be photo realistic, and they'll still be raster based. Many icons are going to be raster based and developers will need to provide multiple resolution versions of their icons. So RI will actually cause some Apps to end up a little larger, while others will be smaller. But icon size is negligible for an average size App. If developers include an icon for every scale setting (which is optional) they're not likely to reach 500 KB. That's less than .5 MB.

The issues in OS X's RI are said to be alignment issues. So some elements on screen may overlap in some current Apps, currently in the "developer only" test environments, and user's are NOT able to turn on RI normally (requires hacking) so RI support in Leopard is provided for developers to prepare their Apps for the an RI enabled OS, possible to be released in the near future.

 

[koobcamuk]

Here's how RI works. Lets say we double the resolution on a screen. Now we have twice as much space to place our windows and icons, but they are half the size they were. If our eyes are good enough, or we're close enough, we can see all this detail, and life is good. But if we need things to be larger in an RI enabled OS, we can increase the scale. To get back to the original "size" on the screen, we set the SCALE to 2. Now everything looks like it did on the original screen, with one difference. The system can display extra detail to sharpen what we're seeing. We may not be able to see all of that extra detail, but we can enjoy all that we are able to see, and now we can lean forward and see more. For many people, this will mean they can lean back and actually see comfortably. And I mean us normal people, not just folks who are legally blind.

I still don't understand it, and I am not stupid. I need to see examples of this because so far, no-one has explained it well.

 

[devman]

I still don't understand it, and I am not stupid. I need to see examples of this because so far, no-one has explained it well.

It ONLY matters for future high-dpi displays. DPI is dots per inch. Let's say pixels per inch to try and make this simple.

Now, let's make up some numbers for ease of explanation.

Let's say your display is physically 10 inches wide. And it's resolution is 1000 pixels across. Thus for every inch of display width there are 100 pixels. Thus this display is 100 DPI or pixels per inch.

Now, say an application you like to use has graphics for its toolbar buttons. Each toolbar button is 50 pixels wide. Thus each toolbar button will physically be 1/2 an inch wide on your display.

Now, you buy a new fancy high-dpi display from Apple. It's still a 10" display width but it has a DPI of 200. That is there are 200 pixels for every inch of width. Those toolbar buttons which used to physically display as 1/2" wide are now physically displayed 1/4" wide. Remember, the graphic image for those buttons is 50 pixels wide and on a display that is 200 pixels per inch they display at 1/4" (50 is 1/4 of 200).

The reason the toolbar button is now suddenly half its physical size on the display is because it is resolution dependent. That is 1 unit of width = 1 pixel. Thus, as the ratio of pixels to physical width changes (as when going from 100DPI to 200DPI) so does the physical size of what you see on screen.

To be resolution independent means that when you go from 100DPI to 200DPI on a 10" wide display, artwork can remain at its same physical width. The extra pixels on the higher-dpi display can be used for greater precision and quality of content if apps and artwork are constructed accordingly.

(note: I've intentionally ignored vector vs raster graphics.)

 

[koobcamuk]

explanation

OK, it was how I thought then. So treating graphics as vectors means that when you make them take up more pixels, they don't looks scruffy because they're vectors and not just expanded images.

I think more people will find your explanation helpful that you might get credit for.

I'll look forward to the new displays as I will be buying up some of the old displays as I think they look amazing.

 

[guzhogi]

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

Probably. It'll just take a while (as in several years) for the proper hardware to be developed and brought mainstream. Right now, a lot of computers can't even handle 2560x1600 due to awful graphics (MacBooks, Mac Minis. tv).

 

[guzhogi]

Quick and dirty explanation why resolution is good. When you make a resolution dependent image (the kind we have now) bigger, you get the stairs/pixellated effect. W/ resolution independence, the image will remain smooth no matter how big it gets.

 

[jayhawk11]

This thread has confirmed my worst fear.







We are officially the biggest nerds on the planet

Seriously though, this is all good stuff. And if Apple working on RI means that we can finally get a Cinema Display refresh, then I'm all for it. I think I hadn't hit puberty yet the last time we had an update

 

[decimortis]

... if Apple working on RI means that we can finally get a Cinema Display refresh, then I'm all for it. I think I hadn't hit puberty yet the last time we had an update

I remember my puberty Mac...'twas the G4 Cube. memories...

 

[Wolfpup]

I'm just thrilled if they get this in there and it works (not sure how well Vista's works). I can't use these crazy high resolutions, and this should fix that.

 

[Otaviano]

Now that just leaves the problem of what to use multitouch for

I mean stretched and flipping images is cool n all, but has anyone actually come up w/ a decent function for multitouch? I haven't seen ANYTHING... :/

A touch version of Photoshop would be killer. Apple could make a pro version of iTunes, where you could control the music and allow the user to scratch, pitch shift, and mix using multi touch. That would be a killer product in the DJ crowd, DJs are already incorporating laptops into their routines, this would make it their one stop product.

You could even make a touch version of something like Final Cut Pro, if you read up on the history of film editing you'll find that a lot of editing was based on the length of the film. Editors built an intuition based on the length of film passing through their hands. A touch version of FCP where you are scrubbing through footage with your hands, could reincorporate some of that.

There are really a lot of great uses for multi-touch, even something like Dreamweaver could be great in terms of working on a websites layout.

Just think different man...

 

[pohl]

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?

Not at all. While that could save some disk space, it wouldn't save nearly as much as the shrinkage seen in the graphs on Roughly Drafted.

Moreover, it's theoretically possible for Apple to trim the size fat binaries without losing architecture-independence. It turns out that the LLVM bc file format is about as small as an x86 binary, yet could be translated into x86/PPC/Arm on-the-fly when an application launches. This paper describes that in gory detail.

 

[kabunaru]

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

Which it should've been in Leopard.
Snow Leopard is basically 10.5 take 2.

 

[solipsism]

Which it should've been in Leopard.
Snow Leopard is basically 10.5 take 2.

I bet you complain about Leopard being buggy, while at the same time insisting that Leopard should have come with a bunch of incomplete code like RI and ZFS.

 

[kabunaru]

I bet you complain about Leopard being buggy, while at the same time insisting that Leopard should have come with a bunch of incomplete code like RI and ZFS.

Leopard is not buggy for me but I don't feel like Snow Leopard is a that big of a major release and shouldn't be called 10.6, at least right now.
Basically Snow Leopard is 10.5.v2.0.

 

[egor]

How does the resolution independence work? What I mean is, how would the component know the size and shape of screen, etc.? My current monitor is a TV, it's decent but even without resolution independence, Windows XP is unaware of its dimensions (unlike with a dedicated monitor, which it seems to pick up).

Or is it something the user is required to adjust, i.e. choosing size of text and icons and then them remaining consistent throughout resolutions.

Also, does this mean that in a hypothetical non-existing scenario a monitor which is a perfect square but has more horizontal pixels than vertical would still display a circle perfectly?

Just some random thoughts, I guess.

 

[solipsism]

Leopard is not buggy for me but I don't feel like Snow Leopard is a that big of a major release and shouldn't be called 10.6, at least right now.
Basically Snow Leopard is 10.5.v2.0.

My apologies, then. Though usually people tend to want it both ways on these forums.

As for SL, it may not have the superficial features that the average user will see or understand, but this is a major step forward that will require a lot of work.

I believe that Apple choose to use a cat name that included 'Leopard' and publicly stated "no new features" despite SL having so many new features because they know Joe Public will not understand what they can't see. The average computer user would see Preview as a cool feature, but not Grand Central making use of their multi-core system.

 

[llahsram]

How does the resolution independence work? What I mean is, how would the component know the size and shape of screen, etc....Or is it something the user is required to adjust, i.e. choosing size of text and icons and then them remaining consistent throughout resolutions.

Well, in the current implementation, it's an adjustable "zoom factor". You can make the user interface 1.25x its normal size, 1.5x, 2x, 3x, etc.

But that doesn't mean that's how it will eventually be implemented. It may be that Apple has some hardware they intend to introduce that will inform the operating system of its physical dimensions, and the system will choose an appropriate zoom factor so that the text is readable at that resolution and screen size.