So, um, where's my resolution-independent UI?

Tiger lays the groundwork, and it's possible for a developer to access some of the tools, but it's far from System-wide simple Apple-like stage. It's rumored to be a feature of the next revision, 10.5

 

Would someone care to explain this upcoming feature to a person who doesn't have a clue? pretty please!

 

right now, when you get a monitor with a high resolution, it means you have small pixels. all icons, dialogue boxes, window frames have a defined size in pixels. that means an icon on a monitor on a powerbook is freaking small. on a 14 inch ibook its about o.k..

a resolution independent system would allow you to view everything at a comfortable size independent of what monitor you use.

andi

 

No. It was never supposed to be a user exposed feature in Tiger. If you install the developer tools you can access it from Quartz Debug. Then you'll see why it's not available yet (i.e. lots of apps don't work very well with it yet).

 

With the advantage that, unlike lowering the monitor resolution, you can use all the pixels available to render as sharp an image as possible. So if you wanted a big UI (or whatever its called) on a system with res-independence, it would be very sharp and detailed (fonts would look good, etc), as opposed to the blockiness you see if you take your 21" monitor and run it at 800x600 pixels....

If you think about Exposé, where you can see all the windows on your screen at the same time, with some apparent detail, even though your screen does not have the resolution to show all of them at the same time, then Res-Independent UI is a little like Exposé in reverse.

 

Ah that's pretty interesting stuff. When Mac OS X was first out I remember one of its 'features' was that it was designed with higher-res monitors in mind. e.g The Menu bar was thicker than OS 9's and you could scale up icon sizes so that they wouldn't be too small on huge displays. The menu bar thickness still annoys me to this day, it's far far too big on a 1024x768 display and I often run out of room for menus!

Would this feature allow me to 'shrink' various objects like the menu bar and window borders? Or is it designed to be automatic so that the whole UI adjusts when you change resolution? On newer monitors I can definitely see this being useful. I've yet to see what the UI looks like on a 30" Apple display, but it's starting to get abit too 'small' even on the 20".

 

Would this be a useful example?

 

Sweet...now we are talking resolution

Where did you get it

 

http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/aquauserinterface.html

It's just an image Apple are using to show off how pretty Aqua is, but it seems appropriate. In 5 years time on your 40" Apple Cinema display Aqua would look really really sweet with that much detail.