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From John Siracusa's excellent OS X Lion review [1]: "Resolution independence has been "coming soon to Mac OS X" since 2005. The dream of drawing the same inte

From John Siracusa's excellent OS X Lion review [1]: "Resolution independence has been "coming soon to Mac OS X" since 2005. The dream of drawing the same interface elements at the same visible size but with more pixels was so close in 2007 that we could taste it. Then Snow Leopard arrived and the Mac's interface scalability features actually regressed. Depressing. Meanwhile, Mac OS X's sibling operating system waltzed right into a high-resolution UI on its very first try. iOS's secret? Don't try to support arbitrary scale factors, just support one: double resolution. A 50x50-pixel square on a non-retina iPhone screen is exactly the same size as a 100x100-pixel square on a retina display. Graphics that have not been updated for the higher resolution are simply drawn with four-pixel squares in place of each low-resolution pixel. All dimensions are nice, even, integer multiples of each other. This is a perfect fit for physical screens which, of course, have an integer number of pixels. Fractional measurements necessarily require ugly compromises. Lion has taken the hint from its younger brother. Arbitrary scalability is gone. In its place is a single check box to enable "HiDPI" display modes. (This option is still hidden away in the Quartz Debug application, so it's clearly not an end-user feature. But unlike all previous incarnations of resolution independence, this one actually works.) After enabling HiDPI, new display modes will become available. In the screenshot above, the 720x450 mode is half native screen dimensions, and the 640x400 mode is half the (non-native) 1280x800 setting. After selecting a HiDPI mode, everything is drawn with twice as many pixels as its non-HiDPI equivalent. Here's a screenshot featuring TextEdit, our usual interface scalability workhorse. It looks pretty good, right? The only flaws are the bitmap graphics that haven't been updated for HiDPI (look closely at the black triangles in the ruler). Unfortunately, there are a lot of these throughout the operating system and its bundled applications. But unlike in all years past, the framework is finally there for third-party developers and Apple itself to finally get their applications ready for a world in which 300-dpi desktop and laptop displays are more than just expensive curiosities." [1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/14 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...

tjoff 15y ago
First thought was "meh", requiring four times the pixels is quite steep. But after giving it some thought that might be as good as one can hope for and considering that the pixel-graphics of today can't really be made to look good scaled up 10-90% it probably is one of the better (the best?) solutions as well (forcing vector graphics is going to be a nightmare and it won't look good on standard-DPI-monitors anyway). (the biggest drawback I guess is that it doesn't really do anything for people wanting a larger interface for readability reasons, having everything four times as large is a hard blow for the real estate when you really wanted 120% or something) What the author constantly mixes up is that you need four times as many pixels, not twice. And thus we need ~400 DPI to have everything at the same size as today. But yeah, just hope that it becomes mainstream enough to be affordable, OLED to the rescue? Thanks to displayport the interconnect won't be a problem at least.

tjoff 15y ago

First thought was "meh", requiring four times the pixels is quite steep. But after giving it some thought that might be as good as one can hope for and considering that the pixel-graphics of today can't really be made to look good scaled up 10-90% it probably is one of the better (the best?) solutions as well (forcing vector graphics is going to be a nightmare and it won't look good on standard-DPI-monitors anyway). (the biggest drawback I guess is that it doesn't really do anything for people wanting a larger interface for readability reasons, having everything four times as large is a hard blow for the real estate when you really wanted 120% or something) What the author constantly mixes up is that you need four times as many pixels, not twice. And thus we need ~400 DPI to have everything at the same size as today. But yeah, just hope that it becomes mainstream enough to be affordable, OLED to the rescue? Thanks to displayport the interconnect won't be a problem at least.