Lots of people expected a resolution independent interface “to appear in Leopard: UI elements that were completely independent of the screen’s resolution, and, finally, a fully scalable interface, and freedom from whatever screen you were working on. Higher resolutions without squeezing down the UI elements. And as we got closer to Leopard, more and more word went around that OS 10.5 would have it. At WWDC 2006, some developers even confirmed it. And Apple even filed a patent to get it done,” Mike Schramm writes for TUAW.
Schramm writes, “Except now it’s November, Leopard is out, and resolution independence is nowhere to be found, at least at the user-accessible level. What gives?”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: According to Apple, it’s in there, Resolution Independence is part of Mac OS X Leopard:
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
The introduction of resolution independence may mean that there is work that you’ll need to do in order to make your application look as good as possible. For modern Cocoa applications, most of the work will center around raster-based resources. For older applications that use QuickDraw, more work will be required to replace QuickDraw-based calls with Quartz ones.
Source: Apple Developer Connection Leopard Technology Overview
what the heck happened to .mac mail? It’s been out for pretty much the whole day
Re: .Mac
Dieser .Mac Dienst ist zur Zeit nicht verfügbar. Wir bedauern die Unannehmlichkeiten. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut.
Ach du lieber!
I was setting up spaces for one of my clients (I’m a computer consultant). He used to use a separate 15 ” display along with his 24″ iMac simply for iCal and some Yahoo Widgets. I told him that now with Spaces, he wouldn’t need the separate smaller monitor and he can have iCal utilize the full 24″ display built-in to his iMac. When iCal is at full size, the text is still too small and I’ve been searching for a way to resolve this issue. He’s 86 years old and doesn’t have the best eye sight. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Actually 72 “dpi” (actually ppi) has been obsolete for quite a while. All of the LCD displays I’ve purchased in the last 5 years or so have been 100 ppi exactly. (In case you are wondering, it is not hard to find out the ppi for an LCD: You just divide it’s maximum native resolution — well, with LCD there really is only one native resolution — by the physical size of the sceen in inches. For example, by current monitor has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, and happens to be approx. 19.2 by 12 inches in size. Easy math.) And even before LCDs became popular, many monitors were 90 ppi or better. Furthermore, neither 72 or 96 ppi has ever been an exact figure for most monitors, just an old, somewhat sloppy average.
“mailissues”?
Macmail has been down at least 3 hours. What a pain but what do you do.
@EON – CONTROL + SCROLL??? or double-click the event name makes it a tad larger…
This happened to it.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/10
Macmail has been down at least 3 hours. What a pain but what do you do.
I’m using SBCglobal.
On leopard… I just found out that I can install Leopard on my daughters emac (using an external DVD drive), but Tiger never would. How cool is that.
_______
Off topic… just had an amazing customer service experience at the local apple store. Last night one of my daughters friends got her hands on my iphone and then dropped it. It was dented right next to the 4-5-6 row when you dial. Those numbers didn’t work this morning. So I set up a genius bar appointment, drive over and wait my turn.
The guy before me is having a serious melt down because his macbookpro has 1 or 2 pixels out. You could barely see it. He says he’s a photographer and needs it perfect. The Apple genius is being as patient with him as you could ever ask anyone to be in the face of his tantrum. He wanted a loaner computer while they fixed this one, and a rebate on the cost for “emotional damage and stress.”
This went on for 45 minutes past my appointment time. I’m just hanging out, checking the net and watching this whole thing go on like a public train wreck.
The guy finally accepts that he will have to give his computer up for a week (worst case scenario), buys another computer that he will return with no restocking fee, and leaves in a huff. All over 1 pixel. The Apple Genius was absolutely amazing. He stayed calm and didn’t ramp up with the nutcase.
Then he asks me what’s up with my iPhone and apologizes for making me wait. I told him my daughter or one of her friends dropped the iphone (it’s obviously dented) and I need to pay to have it repaired.
He tells me since I’ve been waiting so long he’s going to go ahead and swap it out for a new one.
I’m home, syncing it now. The guy is a New Yorker transplanted out here in Orange County. He’s definitely getting my tickets to the Angels game next year when they play the Yankees.
Does anyone know how to turn the Doc labels off in Leopard?
@eon,
Leopard does include resolution independence. This is discussed on page 9 of the Ars Technica review of Leopard. There is a single global scale factor that magnifies everything. This works but is not visually perfect yet, and so hasn’t been enabled as a user accessible feature. The Ars Technica article shows some of the small imperfections you get if you use this. For the next few months, until this appears in Leopard, if you want to set the scale factor you need to use the user interface scale factor control in the Quartz Debug application (part of Apple’s free developer tools).
if you ue quicklook, you’ll notice it…. maybe. The head, when playing movies, doesn’t go pixel by pixel anymore. It goes into subpixels. in other words, it is constantly moving, unlike in 10.4 and down.
@eon…
Forgive me if this is obvious and you’ve already tried it. I’m trying to be helpful and not a smartass (for once).
Have you tried the “Universal Access” control in System Preferences? Map a button on the mouse to do the magnification so that he can just click things to make them bigger. Or perhaps you can find a way to map this onto a particular space (in Spaces) for him.
Good luck!
Reread correction…
it’s the genius bar guy that’s getting the yankees tickets, not the jerk off guy.
This happened to it.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/10
———————–
Okay, I read the link.. Can someone please translate it for me?
Jim – TIV that’s an awesome story. I’ve had really good luck with genius bar types as well (free headphones etc.) I’m sort of surprised that they are being so accomodating with their damage policy. I wonder how this compares to other stores and phone providers.
Nice story, Jim-TV. You know, the sad part is that when you were talking about the guy in front of you who wanted a new computer and compensation for emotional distress, I knew you were from California before you mentioned it.
A quote from http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/HiDPIOverview/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html
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.
You can actually set scaling modes for applications using some Terminal trickery, so it’s only a matter of time before someone writes a simple utility that allows you to set the resolutions for each of your apps independently, even though it may not be a good idea.
Humm. Everyone seems unusually friendly and accommodating today. What’s wrong? Is this really MDN?
@Darkness,
The Universal Access zooming is *not* resolution independence. If you look it makes things fuzzy when you zoom in.
Resolution independence keeps things sharp. As mentioned before, this is supported in Leopard (and was also in Tiger) and can be accessed through the Quartz Debug developer tool – you’ll find “Show User Interface Resolution” in the “Tools” menu. Only applications that you launch *after* you’ve set the scale factor will be shown using the new scale factor.
Having tried it out myself, I can tell you that it’s better than it was on Tiger – window furniture (close button, scroll bars, etc) stays sharp at higher scale factors. (Not too surprising – those things are now defined inside Apple’s new, private, CoreUI framework.) Some things however do not render correctly. I ran up Mail, and one of the mail servers I connect to is down – the error triangle against the mailbox was displayed corrupted. In Address Book the buttons at the bottom of the window all display wrong – and the buttons at the top look a little flakey too… And that’s just the first two apps I looked at.
Seems there’s still some work to do.
No, not just CA Alec, that would be anywhere in the US, where there are more unstable fruitcakes per capita than any western industrialized nation.
@Mike K. – “I’m sort of surprised that they are being so accommodating with their damage policy.” – me too, I’ve had similar reports from 2 friends who bought iPhones. Apple probably wants to keep customers happy to gain market dominance.
“I wonder how this compares to other stores and phone providers.” – beats anything I’ve ever received from another cell phone provider before.
@Alec “I knew you were from California before you mentioned it.” – sad state of affairs in my home state, but true. Customer entitlement is a way of life out here. It permeates the whole society. Especially here in the OC.
I’ve tried resolution independence on my Leopard Powerbook. Had to install the Developer tools, then open the Quartz Debug application (under Graphics Tools). Select the magnification amount on the slider (1, 1,25, 1,5 etc), and reboot (or restart application), and everything is both sharp and big – both text on web pages etc, and menus/icons.
Problem is, there are some estetic imperfections here and there, but from my limited testing, it is still usable.
Apple will probably turn on resolution independence in a point release.
I believe his response was for a real world solution to an 82 year old trying to read text in iCal. Not some nerdy legalease on what constitutes resolution independance. Now it might be a degree off topic, but seeing as the end user will not get to enjoy R.I. until the developers utilize it, It makes perfect sense to suggest zoom in Universal Access. In fact, The solution for my mother , her bi-focals, and her mac mini was zoom. Set it up with the sliders to the far left (in Tiger), check smooth images, and select move continuosly with pointer. Sometimes you have to zoom all the way out to select anything, but that might be fixed in Leopard(anyone?). I bought her a cheap wacom, and set the two buttons on top as zoom in an d zoom out for her. She loves it! I was familiar with it because my mini is hooked up to a cheap Cathode ray tube television -gasp- . She actually ended up preferring the mouse from wacom too. No I don’t work for them in any way. Resolution Independance will be very nice, but if we’re dependant on tthe app writers to decide to what scale, zoom may even remain the answer.
There is, in Leopard, a resolution that is independent of other resolutions. Resolving to be independent isn’t an easy resolution to make. It takes independence. As an independent individual, I resolve that Leopard has resolution independence. Whew, I feel llberated from that whole resolution dependence thing, how ’bout you?
Dude,
Forget resolution independence. Where’s the read-only ZFS? 😀
Zooming via Universal Access is not a viable solution for people whose poor eyesight requires that everything be enlarged. For one thing, moving the cursor around the screen is really screwy when zooming is on.
A much better solution (although it, too, makes everything a little fuzzy) is to simply reduce the screen resolution in the Displays system preference. This simple step, combined with manual font size increases for Desktop folders, Mail and Safari will allow many users with poor eyesight to work in reasonable comfort.
What happened to it is that some people suggested Apple might be working on a resolution independence feature for Leopard, given some of the clues. These people said things that were picked up and repeated by people with less capacity for grasping subtleties like the different between “I suspect that Apple…” and “Apple WILL…” This process repeated ad naseum until the bottom-of-the-barrel sites like CNET were reporting resolution independence as a confirmed feature in Leopard.
In fact, Apple specifically stated at a WWDC session, which was available for free viewing online to anyone who cared to register for a free ADC online membership, that resolution independence was targeted for sometime in 2008.
The stupidity of the collective never ceases to amaze me…
“what the heck happened to .mac mail? It’s been out for pretty much the whole day”
I love how this BOZO hijacked the thread immediately after the story was posted.
I don’t use ROLLEYES as my name on here for nothing!
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As for the TOPIC… I was very disappointed to learn that resolution independence WAS NOT included in Leopard right away.
As an owner of a 17″ MacBook Pro that has a default resolution of 1680×1050, my eyes were screaming for relief from the teeny tiny icons and menu items in Photoshop, to name one application that is very difficult to work with on a high res display.
Hopefully Apple will make this a feature sooner rather than later. This 72 dpi standard should have been thrown out 5 years ago!
Zooming in universal access is exactly what people with bad eyesight need. That’s why it’s in there. Set it to move with cursor. Funny that, it moves as smooth as your cursor.
Bumping up the text size is great, to a point. (Reminder to customise Safari with smaller /bigger text buttons) But dropping resolution is not an option with some programs. If you want to make a movie, everything has to be teeny (for blindish people).
My .mac mail has been working fine all day.
Ive been sending emails all morning with no problem what-so-ever.
@Debbie,
OK, my interpretation of why resolution independence wasn’t ‘turned on’ in Leopard is that it didn’t quite work perfectly in real settings. The trick that Apple invented were interface elements that are both scalable and also ‘lickable’. (The problem with most vector based graphics that can easily be scaled is that they often can’t achieve that photo-realistic 3D effect that we’ve come to expect from the Mac OS.) This was supposed to allow both the detail of vector graphics and the subtle color gradations available with large bitmapped images.
But when the developers tried to use the solution as it currently stands, they were encountering problems with alignment when the interface was scaled. Suppose you have a button bar with a horizontal row of buttons in it that looks perfect at a scale of 1.0. If you scaled it to 2.0 or whatever, the buttons would suddenly start to float up or down relative to one another, making the interface look kind of sloppy. This is a result of an inexact interpretation of this scalable interface elements relative to one another.
At least, that’s how I read the Ars Technica explanation.
Jim-TV,
Tell more about getting Leopard on your daughter’s Mac. I want to get Leopard on my Cube.
And before anyone rants about how I should get a new Mac, my Cube works fine and is being relegated to an iTunes music server.
I’m accepting that Leopard will be the last one I put on it.
Cubert…
I used a external, firewire DVD burner/player to boot the install disk to her emac.
The computer saw the install disk and ran the program fine. Kind of a head scratcher that Tiger wouldn’t do this but Leopard would. So she upgraded from Panther to Leopard. Going to load it to my G4 Sawtooth today just for fun.
It is a testimony to the level-headedness today that people aren’t responding to the usual off-topic trollery.
I’ve always hated the lack of preference settings in OS X applications. Simplicity is okay in moderation, but WTF! Can’t increase the font size in iCal? Even apps that allow such preferences are terribly flawed–increasing the Finder font size does not change the sidebar.
Apple has made some bad decisions here, IMO.
@eon,
I looked around a bit and, in Leopard, you can magnify everything with a shell command such as
“defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 2.0”
Applications launched after this will use the new scale factor. Try setting it to 2.0 before launching iCal and then back to 1.0 — funny decimal scale factors will probably have problems.
@eon,
You can set a scale factor for an individual application, without downloading the developer tools. Try this in the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iCal AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.5
If you want to change the scale factor for all applications, you would use this (already recommended by @Norm):
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.5
If you want to return iCal to using the system default (or the scale factor you’ve specified for all applications), you can use this:
defaults delete com.apple.iCal AppleDisplayScaleFactor
All of these take effect the next time you launch the relevant application.