The next major release of the Mac OS X operating system will include technology that will eventually grant users more control over the way application windows are displayed to the screen. According to sources, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” OS will introduce developer support for resolution independent user interfaces (just like in Longhorn), breaking the software assumption that all display output is to be rendered at 72 dots per inch (DPI).
Mac OS X Tiger to support resolution independent UI, larger icons
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And Apple had the nerve to post those “Redmond, start your photocopiers” posters :rolleyes:
wellthey already copied fast user switching.. god can’t apple come up with *anything* original
/you know what
wellthey already copied fast user switching.. god can’t apple come up with *anything* original
You mean like virtually all GUI concepts (beyond the scant ones implemented at the PARC) still in use today?
Yes, that Windows 95 sure was a piece of 100% original Microsoft work that was completely free of ideas lifted from the Macintosh.
And let’s not forget CoreGraphics will make its debut years ahead of Longhorn…
Apple has a 2560×1600 30-inch display now. Typical web
pages are going to be unreadable.
Fixed scaling is lame, but looks the the way things will be.
Yuck, web pages sizes will be in some unit representing
between 1/500 and 1/1000 of the browser width. Eeeeew.
Exact layout can be nice, provided that the units are sane.
It’s best to measure stuff as a portion of:
a. the minimum readable font size
b. the normal font size
c. the window (viewport) size
Note that this applies to EVERYTHING on the display.
It applies to images, text, tables, and so on.
i was being sarcastic to the first poster…
while apples display is 2560×1600, remember that the size is 30″, its not like they put this resolution in a widescreen 17″.
You’ll find that the resolution across all of apple’s monitors scales niceley. they almost all provide the same “viewing size” as far as windows go, if you were to measure them. (having trouble getting my point across) except the 12 inch iBook.
IF you were to put the 30″ up next to y 17″ studio display, allmost all the widgets and fonts would be the same size, there would just be quite a bit more realestate on the 30″
I don’t really care about who innovates the stuff.
In the end, the one who’s got the better stuff wins.
At least in my opinion.
I agree with you. UI layout shouldn’t be done proportional to font size, rather than according to a fixed percentage of screen size. I don’t know if OS X’s GUI is font-sensitive, but I wouldn’t be too hasty to credit either MS or Apple with coming up with the first resolution independent UI. Any toolkit that is font-sensitive and has a layout manager has 90% of the functionality necessary for a resolution-independent UI.
this is the best thing i’ve read about longhorn yet, too bad its not user accessible (i hope there will be some kind of haxie though).
and anonymous@—.sd.sd.cox.net, how is this copying? did you rtfa? this has been in Quartz from the get go:
From its inception, Apple’s Quartz graphics subsystem was designed to be resolution independent across output devices…
now they’re just making it accessible for computer displays and providing an interface for developers.
i’d love to run a higher dpi on my powerbook. the display is nice enough that fonts could be rendered in less space and still be completely readable and graphics completely viewable. hopefully this works out as well as i have pictured in my head (probably not).
isn’t that what gtk+ does today?
yeah, it is also what Quartz did in 2001 and today. all this is talking about is that now there is an API interface for developers to access.
Resolution independence was an inevitability. You can’t say it was just one person’s idea and therefore it was good or bad. Somebody clearly would have come up with it sooner or later. Windows 95 was designed for a resolution of 640×480, Windows 98 and ME 800×600, and Windows XP (and OSX) 1024×768. Beyond that, the graphical elements don’t scale well. Now, we’re getting to the point of display resolutions beyond the traditional 72 or 96dpi. Printers have progressed at a much higher rate than computer monitors, sporting resolutions higher than 1200. Rasterized graphics systems are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
In a way, you’re right. GTK and Qt apps don’t use hardcoded pixel sizes, but generally use the layout API. That means that most things scale with the font size (which scales with the monitor’s DPI). However, I don’t know of any GTK+ or Qt themes that scale all widgets with font-size. GTK+ and Qt styles generally specify things like scrollbar width in terms of pixels. However, in at least the Qt style API (don’t know about the GTK+ one), it’d be easy for a widget to scale everything based on font-size, since the toolkit get’s all widget metrics from the style itself.
OS X was designed for resolution independence.
read up on Quartz.
How long have we had scalable icons, themes, graphics, resolution in GNOME?
not as long as OS X has had display PDF and its resolution independent display system.
Well, X has had display ghostscript longer than OS X has had DisplayPDF. People didn’t really use it, but until 10.4, OS X’s UI was all bitmaps, Quartz or no Quartz.
There is already a way to lay out websites based on a person’s font size. You simply use EMs. An EM is the size of the letter ‘M’. So width: 50em; would make a width that was the width of 50 ‘M’ characters.
It’s nice to see that an interface that isn’t dictated by resolution is coming. Raster is dead! Long live vector!
SVG should become a accepted webstandard soon. Personally I can’t wait. It will remove the final resolution limited part of web design and make everything scalable, not to mention reduce file sizes for pages even more than they are now.
SGI’s Irix had that feature, what 10 years ago, with a little wheel widget that you could change the magnification of the icons in each individual window. So you could have one folder with large icons, another with small…
Gee, thanks for catching up, Apple.
Thanks for clearing that up, I hadn’t thought of the scrollbar widget. I just tried commenting out the definitions for the scrollbar and indeed it didn’t scale up/down despite my changing the dpi / the size of the font (Smooth engine for Gtk+).
wellthey already copied fast user switching.. god can’t apple come up with *anything* original
You are right this kind of thing have been available in Linux/XFree for at least 10 years and then later in windows XP. But I think you miss the point.
The original in the Apple version of fast user switching is not that you could switch user fast, but the rotating cube stuff that gives the user a hint that whatever processes the first user was running continues to do so after the switch.
I look forward to the day when all I need to set is the refresh rate that I want and the system will automatically figure out the highest resolution (could be non-standard so long as the ratio is the same as the monitor’s or follows the golden ratio) that the video card and the monitor can run at that frequency. Then I could configure my icons and fonts to be a certain size measured in units of lengths (ie. cm, inches) instead of pixels.
Printers have progressed at a much higher rate than computer monitors, sporting resolutions higher than 1200.
Uhh, printers, using a subtractive as opposed to additive colorspace, support resolutions of 1200 dpi @ 1 bit per channel, with 4 channels (CMYK) on color printers. That’s a total of 16 possible color combinations per pixel, so to achieve true color linescreens must be used, which lowers the effective DPI to about 300, and then things like bleeding must be taken into account. Ultimately, you’ll see much higher resolutions achieved much more effectively with LCDs.
Using EMs is ok if you’re using a standard font like Courier, however how does this impact fonts with glyphs and ligatures?
How long have we had scalable icons, themes, graphics, resolution in GNOME?
In response to your troll I have to say that as cool as SVG icons are from a conceptual perspective, the icons in Gnome are ugly as sin.
Meanwhile, virtually all of the raster icons in OS X, meticuously crafted and detailed at 128×128 pixels, are individual works of art.
How is mystilleef a troll because you think GNOME’s SVG icons are ugly?
The size of an em square in both Postscript and TrueType is of a fixed size. Individual glyphs use the em square is a general guideline of how big each character should be, but features can and sometimes do lie outside the em square.
@Bascule: Actually, some printers these days use enough inks and have a small enough ink droplet size that they can display much more than 300 dpi. In contrast, CRT and LCD technology has been stuck at 100dpi for awhile now. The super-cool 130-140dpi screens that are in so many laptops don’t seem to be hitting the desktop markets at all.
How is mystilleef a troll because you think GNOME’s SVG icons are ugly?
The real troll was in the title of the post… “Welcome to the 21st Century…”
This is an article about resolution independent UIs, a feature Gnome does not currently support and it certainly appears OS X will support first.
While Gnome may have the requisite building blocks for resolution independent UIs, they have not yet been implemented.
One of the features being touted, SVG icons, a technology OS X does not possess, are nice conceptually, but in all practicality icons don’t need to scale beyond 128×128, and OS X’s icons simply look better.
Yet Abraxas feels the need to make it sound as if this is a technology Gnome already posesses… it doesn’t. OS X will get it first. It will be Gnome playing catchup in this case, whenever they decide to implement this feature.
Does Gnome even have a menu editor yet? But hey, focus on the resolution independent graphics.
Right, they are so ugly.
http://andy.fitzsimon.com.au/icons.png
Ugh…I’m a troll for saying the truth.
my business graphics and sokoban looked the same (besides the color) on an ega (640×400), cga (320×200) or even an hercules (720×348) screen.
i refuse to believe that steve jobs didnt think of these things when he developed his nextcube and nextstep
but nowadays
text under icons seems to be truncated in the middle of a word to continue on the next line,
gui dialogs cannot resize the window if u using another font for that dialog so text will be cut of.
Right, they are so ugly.
http://andy.fitzsimon.com.au/icons.png
Some of those are fairly decent looking… I’d say on the order of about 50%…
But can you honestly say they look better than OS X? If anything they look like a half assed copy of OS X’s raster icons… which, in my opinion at least, look better anyway.
Ugh…I’m a troll for saying the truth.
Do you still not get it?
GNOME DOES NOT PROVIDE A RESOLUTION INDEPENDENT UI
QED. End of story.
Some of those are fairly decent looking… I’d say on the order of about 50%…
But can you honestly say they look better than OS X?
Yes. They are also scalable too. That is, they look the same at 128x128pixels, 256x256pixels, 32x32pixels or even 16x16pixels. No question, they are better. Oh, and you can use them at any resolution. Looks great on 72dpi, 96dpi, 100dpi monitors. I don’t think they’d look different on 300dpi monitors either. And here we are getting our wet pants over the fact that OS X’ graphics are coming of age.
GNOME DOES NOT PROVIDE A RESOLUTION INDEPENDENT UI
Depends on how you define UI and/or resolution independence. I’d say GNOME is already a step ahead of OS X in that respect. Today, GNOME has icons and themes that scale gracefully to available resolutions. It seems OS X starts cough at anything beyond 72dpi. Once again Tiger, welcome!
My problem with GNOME’s icons is the muddy, dark, depressing color palette of dirty grays, dark blues and muddy browns. Even those icons linked here use this muted, unapproachable color scheme.
I’ve been told that’s because they’re the only colors everyone in the world can see, colorblind or not. That’s stupid. We can’t have bright colors, reds and greens, in the interface because some guys can’t see them?
If GNOME would up the bright and happy in its color palette, I’d find it a lot more palatable.
Yes. They are also scalable too.
So are raster graphics. Had you ever used OS X you might have seen how quickly and beautifully Quartz is able to scale raster graphics. Try turning on the magnification feature on the dock for a demonstration.
That is, they look the same at 128x128pixels, 256x256pixels, 32x32pixels or even 16x16pixels. No question, they are better.
They’re better why… because they can scale beyond 128×128? Can you give me an instance in which this is really necessary? 128×128 is already monumentally large for icons.
And here we are getting our wet pants over the fact that OS X’ graphics are coming of age.
Quick review… Quartz Extreme has 3D accelerated compositing which allows for features like Expose, and has had features like translucent windows, on-the-fly resolution switching, and drop shadows on Windows since 10.0, whereas xrandr is comparitively new technology. The CoreVideo API allows for some rather impressive 3D effects, such as reflections on live video:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/ichat.html
XFree86 has… none of these, in fact, Cairo can’t even render to a GL backend yet.
By resolution independent UI we’re talking about scaling the relative size of windows on the fly and having all elements resize themselves so that the window layout remains constant… only the size has changed. Gnome CANNOT DO THIS.
My problem with GNOME’s icons is the muddy, dark, depressing color palette of dirty grays, dark blues and muddy browns. Even those icons linked here use this muted, unapproachable color scheme.
This is just one iconset out of a multitude. If you enjoy bright cartoonish colorful icons, you can give Gartoon a try. I chose these icon set because they strive to be HIG complaint, they look professional, they look pretty unique and… ahem…they are resolution independent.
I’ve been told that’s because they’re the only colors everyone in the world can see, colorblind or not. That’s stupid. We can’t have bright colors, reds and greens, in the interface because some guys can’t see them?
Properly designed icon sets should change according to the theme you use. Colorblind individuals are comfortable using hi-color themes. I think the next version of the icon set I listed will be capable of doing that. So using a bright theme might alter the color of the icons. Cool, isn’t it?
If GNOME would up the bright and happy in its color palette, I’d find it a lot more palatable.
KDE uses very bright colors in its icons/theme(UI?). You might find it palatable.
So are raster graphics.
Bitmap images loose their quality when you scale them. They become pixelated/distorted.(read: ugly to use when enlarged especially on monitors). Vector graphics on the other hand scale without loosing their quality. GNOME is capable of utilizing pure vector images and themes.
Had you ever used OS X you might have seen how quickly and beautifully Quartz is able to scale raster graphics.
I own an iMac. Quartz incorporates ugly hacks to the deceive the user into thinking the image is being scaled. Several pixel sizes of the image have to be drawn and stored in a cache. Quartz then selects which image to use when necessary. Even then, Bitmap images have their limitation irrespective of the ugly hacks Quartz utilizes. If you try to scale your icon to a size for which there is no specifications in your cache, the image becomes distorted.
Try turning on the magnification feature on the dock for a demonstration.
Magnification isn’t a test of lossless image quality and scalability.
They’re better why… because they can scale beyond 128×128?
Yes
Can you give me an instance in which this is really necessary? 128×128 is already monumentally large for icons.
It’s not, if you have a 3000×2000 300dpi monitor resolution. You sound like the person who said 640KB of RAM is all users will ever need a few years ago.
Quick review… Quartz Extreme has 3D accelerated compositing which allows for features like Expose, and has had features like translucent windows, on-the-fly resolution switching, and drop shadows on Windows since 10.0, whereas xrandr is comparitively new technology. The CoreVideo API allows for some rather impressive 3D effects, such as reflections on live video:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/ichat.html
XFree86 has… none of these, in fact, Cairo can’t even render to a GL backend yet.
Coooool! I don’t use XFree86, I use xorg-x11. It supports translucent windows, on the fly resolution switching and drop shadows. Nobody uses Cairo, it’s alpha.
By resolution independent UI we’re talking about scaling the relative size of windows on the fly and having all elements resize themselves so that the window layout remains constant… only the size has changed. Gnome CANNOT DO THIS.
To the best of my knowledge it can. You’d have to adjust your fonts though. The fonts won’t scale or adjust automatically. But your window layout will remain unaffected. The industrial theme does that for example.
Also when you say resolution, do you mean monitor resolution or dpi resolution? Your use of the phrase resolution independence confuses me.
I’m still waiting for someone to show me how photographic images would look with a UI that only uses vectors to be resolution independent. Or vector icons that aren’t cartooney for that matter. The reason why OSX has good looking icons is that the top resolution for them was set to 128×128. From what I have seen it seems Longhorn’s top size is going to be set to 256×256. Now if all you care about is cartoons then more power to you. But I don’t want my choices to be limited by the technology I’m using.
IMO like it or not until they can render in vectors photos 1:1 raster images are here to stay.
If they removed raster and ONLY had vectors in a system that is.
@;ystilleef : so if I understand you correctly, the size of scrollbars, the width of button borders, the size of the title bar, the size of the desktop icons, will be doubled *automatically* in all GTK+ themes when you double the screen resolution in your X configuration?
SVG should become a accepted webstandard soon. Personally I can’t wait. It will remove the final resolution limited part of web design and make everything scalable, not to mention reduce file sizes for pages even more than they are now.
Is this a troll? Gah, I have to respond… So, um, the problem with that is photographs. Usually the images that have anything to do with page width (i.e., header images, corporate showcases, etc., NOT icons and buttons) either are or consist of photographs. Photographs are raster images. You can raise the font size all you want, but scale those images up and they will look like crap.
Additionally, a website is fast-changing media. Departments want new content flying up constantly. Good vector graphics take a lot longer to create than good raster graphics, and there are far fewer people who can do it. That means more $$$.
My take is this: any company who disengages apparent resolution from physical resolution is responsible for incorporating tools to deal with it. For example, if you have a screen with 4x the resolution, you could show portions of it at a more normal resolution just by using blocks of 4 pixels to represent 1 pixel. If you did this for just one app, then you could enjoy Photoshop nirvana and still be able to read OSNews.
So, the web will never be vector. There are also many good reasons not to make variable-width pages. The simple fact that most eyes can’t follow line breaks much wider than the average web page should be enough by itself.
Why is the assumption, besides the smartass remark in the article, that Apple somehow copied this from Longhorn? Apple COULD have had this in developement long before MS.
hi,
SVG icon also has hinting issue like font do.
Scaling down an icon will never make it
look ‘the same’ as its 128×128 version.
Please take a look at hinting issue in true type font.
I’m wondering about the scaling issue, does evas
also need to cache the scaled result?
@Dann
hi,
It should be like that but for a reason changing
the graphic state’s matrix doesn’t make Cocoa’s widget
scaled or rotated correctly. This is unlike GNUstep and probably
NeXTStep, those can scale/rotate their widgets better than
Cocoa’s. (Note that I am still using Jaguar for financial
reason) GTK+ would make it closer once it is ported to Cairo’s
geometry system and not just a theme that sit on the top
of it, according to my understanding.
“OS X was designed for resolution independence.”
It clearly was not as otherwise why is it not using a resolution independent icon format?
Resolution independence is the logical direction to go in when you have a vector based graphics system. It was obvious to me that the direction Apple would move in from the moment Quartz was unveiled.
The magnification/zoom feature in OS X 10.2 seemed to back up that they were thinking about this. Why should anyone need to copy anyone else, when all they have to do is listen to ordinary users who can see what the future is?
Back when NeXT came out with Display Postscript there was little point in a zoom function, but the world has changed and surely it doesn’t take Steve Jobs or Bill Gates to see that.
“It clearly was not as otherwise why is it not using a resolution independent icon format?”
The graphics system IS resolution independent and clearly a lot of work went into it. Until you activate that feature why should vector icons be high on the priority list? Remember that 10.0 was released without scanner, CD burning or printer sharing support. There are many parts of OS X that still need plenty of work.
Also, you may find that 10.4 is released with a magnification/DPI feature and the icons are still bitmaps – that will make the icon argument a little redundant…
scalable graphics has hinting issues as farm boy pointed out. and these issues are all but minor. also, don’t forget that there are (and will be for a long time) cellphones, pdas etc out there with lower resolution screens. raster is not dead yet. vector can and must only play along nicely.
I have never quite grasped that resolution stuff, but after having read the article I understand that a resolution independent UI would allow to have the content of different windows displayed with different resolutions on the same desktop: for example, on a 72dpi screen, I could have the content of window Z at (72 x 4)dpi, the content of window Y at (72 x 2)dpi.
If that’s right, then I don’t see Gnome having that feature. And I don’t see how it could have it, not being an X server.
One note…
OS X icons can be bigger than 128 pixels and have different sizes in the same window… This was a hidden feature that was eliminated in Panther, but probably is still posible to use it…
There is a haxie to control this:
http://www.pixture.com/macosx.php.
It’s called IconsizeEnabler.
Some pictures:
http://www.pixture.com/img/screen-isiz-1.jpg
http://www.pixture.com/img/screen-isiz-3.jpg
There is no such thing, to a normal person, as an intelligent discussion that goes on for 4 pages about which operating system’s icons are better, as if one could convince the other in the first place.
Go outside. Meet a human. Go for a bike ride.
Your life is not your computer.
Timmy boy, you obviously don’t really understand what is going on with this discussion. This is more or less a “holy war” that has been going on for decades.
mystilleef you are partially right. An icon CAN have multiple variations of itself within the icon file, to optimize for the different resolutions, but it is not required. It is done that way so that when icons are viewed small in the FINDER it can still be obvious what the icon is supposed to be without looking fuzzy. I don’t believe the dock scales based on those though. I believe they scale them up and down based on the 128 icon. Mainly because on certain apps the small icon is noticeably different, like different details have been taken out, but when I have over 200 icons on my dock, the icons look like just tiny versions of the 128 version instead of the pre-done downsized.
As far as anyone saying they copied this and that, a lot of the features that we are just now seeing in OSX Tiger, and have seen in the past are features that were originally intended for Copland. I am not saying this having used Copeland, but rather having read about the different features that I’ve read about that were intended to be in there, but never made it. Like a way to create relationships between document files, and the users that create them in a relational-database manner. This is something Spotlight does. The whole resolution independent UI thing I believe was taken from NeXT’s postscript functionaly, but I could be wrong. I have been up all night so my spelling is probably off so please forgive me. A lot of these features that MS and Apple are coming out with have been “holy grail’s” for operating systems for over 10 years now. Cairo was supposed to do what Longhorn and Tiger is doing today. And BeOS did the whole relational metadata thing since the beginning. We can sit here and argue about this stuff for hours. Personally, I’ve read everything I can get my hands on on MS’s corporate history, and have read a few on Apple’s.
Whitehatzero is correct, the resolution independent UI, of Mac OS X, is taken from NeXT’s Display Postscript (the core of which makes up the display engine of PDF, which is the same resolution independent core used by Quartz [not, necessarily, code wise, but graphic model wise, at least]), which, in turn, was a refinement of Sun’s NeWS (that lost out to the clunkier X11).
Incidentally, at least as far back as Mac OS X 10.0, I was able to use vector graphics based icons (using PDF images, or any other vector graphic format supported by NSImage), just like I was able to use EPS format vector graphics icons in NeXTstep. The problem is only that most applications don’t bother with such “icon” formats because you don’t have the same degree of photo-realistic control as with raster graphics forms. (Of course, I’ve seen many arguments as to whether icons should ever be photo-realistic or whether they should only be “iconic” representations.)
ohh you opened a can of worms.
now ever macolite is out to get you.
it doesnt matter if you got something partially wrong or not, they will string you up immediately.
to all the mac fanboys, ease back a bit, seriousely, the person did not just insult your mother, father or dead grandmother. it is just a computer company.
“Go outside. Meet a human. Go for a bike ride.
Your life is not your computer.”
Heh heh, most sensible things I’ve EVER seen posted at this website. Keep reminding them, Tim. They need it bad.
Actually, Cairo can render via the GL backend just fine. This capability, I might add, is quite a step beyond what Quartz Extreme offers currently.
The bottom line is this: neither GNOME/KDE nor OS X 10.3 are currently resolution-independent. In some ways, GNOME/KDE are ahead (resolution-independent icons, font-sensitive, layout-based UI) and in others OS X is ahead (vector-graphics drawing API). As for what Cairo and OS X 10.4 will look like — we can have that discussion when they are actually released
When you say Cairo, do you mean the dead Cairo that never shipped from MS?
To my knowledge, Microsoft’s Cairo was a database filesystem like WinFS and BeFS. He is talking of Cairo, a OSS project for rendering SVGs and stuff like that.
When I looked at the original edition of Inside Macintosh (circa 1984) I saw some hints that they had done some work toward resolution independence, but removed it. I guess they decided a 0.008 GHz processor wasn’t fast enough.