High resolution displays and resolution independence
72 DPI (dots per inch) sucks. Sure flat panel displays and in-software antialiasing have helped readably on a computer screen over the last few years, but their is still a long way to go for it to actually become as pleasant an experience as say a printed book. Happily improved hardware is on the horizon and for the first time the major software makers are starting to seriously talk about resolution independence. Resolution independence starts of course through a vector-based graphics engine. Mac OS X has been building and evolving Aqua over the last 5 years, and it looks like Microsoft will finally have its own engine, Areo, in distribution “soon.”
Because of the maturity of Aqua and its ownership of the entire widget (the hardware, the operating system and the software), Apple is in a prime position to push the industry forward to higher resolution displays and I would not be surprised to see it as a significant feature of 10.5 (accompanied by new high resolution displays), to be publicly previewed at WWDC this August. One clear sign this is on the mind of Apple can be found in the release notes of Tiger and the developer tools in Tiger that demo how scaling might work.
If you have the developer tools installed and want to see this in action, open Quartz Debug in Developer > Applications > Performance Tools. Then from its menu bar choose Show User Interface Resolution.
This brings up a small panel that allows you to set the resolution you want to preview.
Then simply launch an app and see how it is rendered in that resolution. Lots of the stuff Cocoa handles for you (like menus, and highlighting are already working fairly well).
Full Size of High Resolution Menus
Remember, this idea is not that we’ll be working in an oversized layout as you are seeing it previewed (reliving our youth, ala level four of Super Mario 3), but to offer high resolution displays, and instead of continuing to render the user interface at 72 dpi do it at a much higher resolution, making the text and graphics sharper and much easier to read.
As a user I’m really looking forward to high resolution displays, and as a developer (for both Desktop and Web) I’m anxious to learn how I can best make my apps/sites take advantage. It is with this mindset, I really enjoyed reading the latest post on the Surfin’ Safari Blog about High DPI Web Sites. Clearly the Safari camp is already evaluating things, and it’s great they are being open about how they are considering approaching the problem (and thus, soliciting feedback from the community). I personally still have a lot to learn about it all, but am looking forward in doing so.
Posted on: April 22, 2006 – 3:52 pm
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