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Living a High-DPI desktop lifestyle can be painful on Windows

188 points by henrik_w 13y ago

pilif 13y ago
you can say what you want about Apple in general, but they way they "fixed" this issue with the retina macs is so much better than what windows is doing. Windows has had the DPI selector ever since 3.1 (or even 3.0), but because nobody traditionally tweaked the settings, nobody bothered to make their apps look right and because nobody bothered to make the apps look right, nobody tweaked the settings because running higher DPI modes was breaking apps all over the place. Mac OS did this too - I think in the 10.4 timeframe there was an option to actually switch into a higher DPI mode and many of the OS-internal UI assets were vector images. They probably noticed that it will never work out, so they opted to go for a hack: With the exact quadrupling of the resolution, we got a solution that works mostly transparently for the applications. They still think they are drawing with a one-pixel resolution, so the burden of getting this right moved from the app makers to the OS maker. Even if an application has no modifications for retina displays, it will look mostly right (minus some blurring issues for pixel art). There will be no scaling issues, no texts will be cropped and everything will be scaled by the same factor. If you want to 'optimize' your app for retina, all you do is provide higher resolution bitmaps and you're mostly fine. The exception is some text-editors (sublime) and browsers (chrome) that were doing some manual text rendering, not relying on the OS API. These had to be fixed manually, but there really weren't that many applications like that. Yes, the way Windows does it is probably more "purist". Yes, the way Windows does it allows for arbitrary scaling factors (also sub 200%). But it doesn't work in practice. Yes. The Apple solution is a hack. Yes, it doesn't allow scaling to arbitrary factors. Yes, providing 2x bitmaps instead of one vector image is annoying. But it works in practice. On a retina mac, you'd never see the issues the OP complained about seeing on their Windows machine. What you get there might be superior from a technical standpoint, but it all boils down to an ugly half-working mess because developers just don't bother to get it right. I'm not excluding myself here. I've done a few windows apps and I f'ed up high dpi modes as many times as everybody else - also because my development environment (Delphi) made some assumptions that just didn't work well with high-dpi modes. Getting HDPI right on Windows (Desktop): Really hard and thus not worth it for most developers. Getting HDPI right on the Mac: Trivially easy.
- swombat 13y ago
  Mac does this even better. It does allow arbitrary scaling - for some definitions of arbitrary. For example, my MBPR 13" is set to the setting between "Best (Retina)" (which is the exact 2x, 1280x800 I think) and "More space") (which is 1.52x, 1680x1050), so I get 1.77x the space (1440x900). You control the DPI there and everything remains nice and sharp. Apps aren't even aware of this scaling, so everything works perfectly well.
  - pilif 13y ago
    Yeah. But the virtual resolutions are fixed depending on the screen. There's no way to arbitrarily set a virtual resolution and the OS only offers this for screens it knows (see the MacPro Review from anandtech where they tried to enable HDPI with that 4K display: the os only offered the 2x mode). That's why I wouldn't call that arbitrary scaling. If they could offer it using their method, I'm sure they would.
    - 4ad 13y ago
      It's not exposed in the settings, but it can scale to any apparent resolution. There are various 3rd party programs that can set any apparent resolution for you. And of course, you can see this without any 3rd party software if you connect it to a monitor or projector with a weird resolution and enable mirror mode.
  - eropple 13y ago
    I get what you're saying, but this is probably not a great way to think about it because it isn't arbitrary scaling, it's arbitrary backbuffer resizing. The way this works internally is to render to a HiDPI buffer at 1680x1050 Cocoa points (mapping pixels:points at 2:1). It's still @2x, the buffer just gets downsampled afterwards and the pixel density is high enough that it's difficult to tell in practice.
- lmm 13y ago
  In fairness, high-DPI screens on Windows are a new thing. If (and I realize it's a big if) apps get fixed over the next couple of years to handle different DPI settings, then the end result will be a lot more usable for e.g. vision-impaired users who want to use a higher DPI setting than the default.
msy 13y ago
Can we get 'on windows' added to the title? None of this is about high-DPI/Retina displays in general, it's just Windows and Windows ecosystem issues
- panacea 13y ago
  It's humorous that at the end of his article he asks: > "Do you have any examples of high-DPI frustration on the Desktop? Upload them to ImgUr.com and link to them in the comments!" Yeah... your blog post looks like shit on my MacBook Pro... all your screenshots are blurry messes.
  - shanselman 13y ago
    Because I don't have x2 PNGs for all the screenshots? Don't then all screenshots look lousy for you? They do for my Retina PC.
  - Filligree 13y ago
    Huh, they look fine on my MBPr. Because I'm using Chrome? It has a very good sharpening filter.
    - panacea 13y ago
      Wow... night and day compared with Safari. Can't for the life of me find details about the different approaches via search. Any links to why the browsers differ?
      - Filligree 13y ago
        Google implemented a sharpening filter in Chrome(ium), Apple didn't for Safari. That's it.
zokier 13y ago
I guess the best way to solve this would be to (partially) ignore the dpi awareness flag in applications and instead apply a series of heuristics and white/blacklists (with user override) for determining if applications truly are hidpi capable. That would be bit of a pita for the applications that actually do support hidpi properly now and might get still bitmap scaled, but that would be just a temporary issue.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  What bothers me is that this crisis has been obvious since well before Apple started releasing their Retina screens on mobile devices. X has 75 dpi and 100 dpi fonts for a reason and we had 2D acceleration on every decent computer for what? 15 years? We've been using pixels as size units for no reason other than laziness.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Vector rendering is still not advanced enough to completely (or even mostly) replace bitmaps. Until they are, we'll have to redline our bitmaps for each resolution manually. It's not just a matter of laziness.
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      > Vector rendering is still not advanced enough to completely (or even mostly) replace bitmaps. Wait, what?!? Vector rendering matured before bitmaps were common place. They are faster and use less memory, that's why programmers of the 70's and 80's loved to use them. Bitmaps are easier. That's the only reason people use them. And only in a world where everybody gets images on the same size and resolution.
      - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Your information is just plain wrong. My wife does a lot of pixel redlining at her job: the artifacts they produce are all done in Illustrator, a vector program. And believe me, they would love to leave them as vectors...less work for them! However, they must be converted to bitmaps and manually redlined to eliminate sub-pixel alignment problems. Bitmaps are not easier, otherwise the designers would be cranking out pixels directly in Photoshop and not Illustrator. The fact that NO ONE has produced a decent general purpose vector renderer that avoids pixel artifacts, even a non real-time one, means that my wife will be redlining for quite a few more years. Even font rendering (arguably simpler than icons) requires substantial hinting to be effectively resolution independent.
riquito 13y ago
What's the situation on GNU/Linux?
- benjaminwootton 13y ago
  I had the same question. A 3200x1800 resolution on a laptop sounds wonderful!
  - kolme 13y ago
    As an owner of a ASUS Zenbook I can confirm it is a pleasure, almost orgasmic, to program on such resolutions :)
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Well... X knows about dpi for ages. Unfortunately, people have been using pixel-based shortcuts for ages too for almost everything. The way Apple used to "fix" it is curious considering NeXT was, AFAIK, dpi-aware from the start.
  - joosters 13y ago
    Not so curious. As numerous comments here show, just about every display subsystem (be it X, Mac OS or Windows) has been DPI-aware for some time, but the 3rd party software that runs on these systems has made woeful use of it. Apple's fix gave consistent, reliable results.
- lvillani 13y ago
  Some basic support was introduced in Gnome 3.10 (and Gtk+) (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY) thanks to some Chromebook Pixels donated by individuals and Intel (http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-donations-to-assist-with-high-definition-support/ http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-do...). After googling for about five seconds I found a review and the TL;DR is "it kinda works, but there are bugs" (like Windows, see http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270 http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270). Never tried first hand, hope to have a chance with the Retina MacBook Pro I'm buying at the end of March.
CaRDiaK 13y ago
I got IntelliJ running really slick and smooth in QHD+. Set the compatability to disable scaling for hidpi. Then just set the text in settings to be 26pt. I know have a retina looking IDE on my Ativ Book 9 Plus.
latitude 13y ago
Just to be clear - supporting High-DPI on Windows is not as simple as adding scaled up resources. Instead, it is an absolutely royal pain. For one, you can't just throw hires bitmaps into a resource section of .exe and expect them to magically work. There needs to be code that looks at current DPI and picks matching bitmap. For two, standard DPI levels are 96, 120, 144 and 192, but guess what? All other values in between and above 192 are game too. In fact, there's a nice little slider in the Control Panel that encourages you to put it somewhere in between. This means that your code either needs to rescale bitmaps to match these odd DPIs or use the largest one that fits. In either case the result will look like butt. For three - the dialog layout. If your dialogs have text that's longer than 3-4 words, the chances are that it will either overflow, underflow or wrap differently under different DPIs. This in turn means that you need to test dialog appearance with at least 4 different font sizes and Tahoma 8px for Windows XP. Do you know how hard it is to word a longish sentence so that it would fill about the same space with all 5 combinations? Really damn hard and very time consuming. But wait! There's more. Every app icon needs to exist in at least 9 sizes, like so - http://imgur.com/5Pe2ZV0 http://imgur.com/5Pe2ZV0 - and this would still miss some cases where Windows will scale an arbitrary chosen icon image and use it. It really is a mess. However this is not something unexpected if you've been writing for Windows for a while. This mess is a routine.
- madeofpalk 13y ago
  > For three - the dialog layout. If your dialogs have text that's longer than 3-4 words, the chances are that it will either overflow, underflow or wrap differently under different DPIs. This in turn means that you need to test dialog appearance with at least 4 different font sizes and Tahoma 8px for Windows XP. Do you know how hard it is to word a longish sentence so that it would fill about the same space with all 5 combinations? Really damn hard and very time consuming. I don't understand that one. If the text is going to be a different size because it's scaled with the DPI, then hasnt the dialog itself scaled equally as well?
  - latitude 13y ago
    All sizes in dialog templates are indeed specified in "dialog units", which are based on the metrics of the dialog's font. So in theory if you are to double the font size, all dialog elements would just double in size and all will be well. In practice, this is not sufficiently accurate to accommodate text size differences when going from one font/size to another. It's just too crude. For example - http://imgur.com/STtd8OQ http://imgur.com/STtd8OQ Top is SegoeUI/9pt, standard for DPI of 96. Middle is SegoeUI/10pt, standard for DPI of 125. Bottom is Tahoma/8pt, standard for XP at 96. See how bottom two trim "practice"? That shouldn't be happening, but it does.
tux10 13y ago
This is one of the biggest reason I just can't move away from my regular DPI laptop. Every time I have tried a HiDPI display with Windows it is painful. Text looks great but icons and widgets look like shit. Things get better with every new version of Windows but Microsoft have been promising true DPI independence since Vista yet things are still crap.
- ZoFreX 13y ago
  Back in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 I remember this stuff actually working quite well, a lot of people I knew were running Windows with non-default DPI settings. As newer versions came out, and also as people started using third party GUI toolkits more and more, things started getting less consistent.
  - kolme 13y ago
    I think those old settings only concern fonts. Icons and other pixel-measured things would still look ridiculously small (making it a mess of small-things-with-big-fonts).
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    Windows was originally designed to be DPI-independent. After all, Windows 1.0 had to run on 320x200 CGA adapters -- complete with non-square pixels.
- philliphaydon 13y ago
  I run Windows 8.1 on a 15" MBP/r and it looks great. Stop whinging about non-existent problems.
Aardwolf 13y ago
Why are names like "High-DPI" used? There was a time when 320x200 graphics with 256 colors was amazing. Would 800x600 have been considered "high DPI" back then? Or in the time were people were playing Duke Nukem 3D at 640x480 pixels, would they have considered 1920x1280 to be "high DPI"? Windows has transitioned all the way from 640x480 in Windows 3.11 to the resolutions of today, why would there be a problem with just another step up? What is "high" DPI today? What will it be tomorrow?
- thornjm 13y ago
  Perhaps because we reaching a point where our eyes can longer perceive the individual pixels that we really have reached maximum resolution. Is there any benefit from higher resolution displays?
  - mas644 13y ago
    there will always be those hardcore "videophiles" that will claim they can see the pixels even at a nanoscale ;)
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    One advantage of high-density displays you sometimes see mentioned is that "we won't need to use anti-aliasing / sub-pixel rendering!" However at the common "high" density used in cellphones these days, 320+ DPI or so, artifacts in non-AA fonts are still visible (not always, or to everybody, but sometimes anyway). So, at least, there are some cases where higher-density than today could yield some benefit.
    - jbverschoor 13y ago
      I've turned off subpixel anti aliasing on my macbook pro retina. Net step would indeed be disabling anti aliasing
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The ~235 ppi of the Retina display probably isn't there yet. The human eye is really a nifty organ. For example, it increases the spatial resolution of perception above the density of the rods/cones by sampling from slightly different viewpoints and integrating over time. See: http://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html http://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html. Also, there is the fact that you can move your face closer to the screen to look at something small. The eye can resolve over 800 ppi at 4". Finally, the fact that the eye can resolve say 300 ppi at a particular distance doesn't mean that's the best resolution for the underlying screen. If you want to render without tricks like anti-aliasing, you want to have enough resolution so that you avoid visible artifacts. E.g. imagine rendering two adjacent thin diagonal lines separated by 0.3 arc-minutes (the spatial resolution of the eye). You want enough resolution so that you can render those lines without their touching anywhere.
workbench 13y ago
Honestly don't know what you were expecting, Windows devs have NEVER cared about UI.
ZoFreX 13y ago
One of the most depressing areas of Windows to look at is the various control panel screens. Some of them, I kid you not, will show different bits of text in up to three different sizes. If Windows itself doesn't deal with different DPIs correctly, what kind of example does that set for application developers? Another application that definitely deserves mentioning is Chrome. It looks absolutely terrible. It's really blurry and browsing the web for even a couple of minutes really strains my eyes. If you run high DPI Windows, you're going to need a different browser than Chrome (Firefox looks fine but unsurprisingly does not perform so well at such a high resolution. Internet Explorer is actually not a bad choice - high res and fast)
- ghusbands 13y ago
  If you can stand to have tiny tabs, set the compatibility mode for Chrome to disable high-DPI scaling and set the default zoom in the browser options to something like 175%. It's a trick that works with many apps.
- yummysoup 13y ago
  In Windows 8.1 you can override the scaling for individual apps through their properties dialogs. Set Chrome to not scale, then set the zoom within Chrome to be > 100%. The url bar and tabs will be a bit small but the page content will look good.
  - wvenable 13y ago
    TIL. I upgraded to Windows 8.1 but I didn't know about this. Anything Java doesn't handle high DPI and will simply be doubled and is a blurry mess. I actually turned off DPI scaling just because of Java but if I can control it on a per-application basis that would be preferable.
  - ZoFreX 13y ago
    Awesome tip, thank you. I have an 8.1 license but have to install Windows 7 first, and hadn't bothered with the extra time to upgrade it yet. I know what I will be doing this weekend :)
- 13y ago
forrestthewoods 13y ago
I'm actually impressed that windows apps support it at all. I didn't realize it could actually work properly if programs took the time to do it right. With High-DPI monitors finally coming out I'd expect dramatically improved support moving forward.
0x0 13y ago
It's pretty amazing that Adobe is doing particularly bad. Keepers of pdf and postscript, you would think they knew all about fonts and dpi.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > It's pretty amazing that Adobe is doing particularly bad. Adobe has historically been bad at playing well with Windows. They like to reimplement large parts of the UI.
codeulike 13y ago
Remote desktop is really annoying on high dpi screens - the client cant scale up (although it can scale down) so you end up with a tiny view of your server.
nettletea 13y ago
I can't even use my Windows 8.0 on my 32 inch TV that is 1080 sitting a couple of metres away, while keeping the resolution and boosting all the accessibility settings to the max. Even the metro Apps I can't use. I'd need a 50ft display! It's another facet of display/accessibility issues. I had high hopes after Media Centre, that Windows would get this right. And bought Windows 8.0 specifically for this purpose. Disappointing. I'm forever going over to the TV and my neck hates it. Personally I think part of the solution is to change the menuing system, breaking it out from the window. If I can at least use the menus/controls on apps I have a good chance of using them.
- teh_klev 13y ago
  Wierd, I've got my Windows 8.0 laptop hooked up to my 40" Samsung 1080p telly (bought in 2007) and it all looks good, even from ~3m away...and that's using just the VGA input (Dell didn't stretch to a DVI port on their cheapo Vostro 1720 range back in the day).
  - nettletea 13y ago
    Well your eye sight is way better than mine. Metro apps are almost usable, the desktop is barely usable (I have to walk over to the set, and that's with the text size increased. I have a very small (not titchy) living room.
    - math0ne 13y ago
      That doesn't sound right. There is a special setting that lets you change the size of metro apps, have you tried adjusting that?
      - nettletea 13y ago
        Yes.
ghusbands 13y ago
I've had the pleasure of using a high-DPI display on Windows 7 for a while, now. There are some tricks that help significantly: 1. Calibrate ClearType to use as little color as possible (use the system magnifier to help); this way, when apps get scaled the text is just blurry rather than blurry with odd color-fringing. 2. For apps that are incompatible but suitably configurable, set their compatibility mode to disable HiDPI scaling and then set their font sizes (or default zoom) to be larger. This works well for Chrome and Skype, at least. 3. For those times when you momentarily have trouble, remember that the windows key and the plus key will zoom your whole desktop.
pdkl95 13y ago
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h... This is a few years old now, but is still one of the better explanations of the issues involved in modern font rasterization, with emphasis on how Microsoft's likely held back the entire industry by only realistically supporting widget fonts at the standard 96ppi. Really, anything other than the stock Arial 10pt/96ppi is going to cause layout issues. In an effort to very-aggressively hint that font so it looks consistent, they throw out horizontal accuracy by rounding to pixel boundaries. Per-letter. Ouch. The best part of the paper, though, is this image that moves the sentence to the right exactly 1/10 pixel each line: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/sample_arial_1tenth_shift.png http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/sample_...
interpol_p 13y ago
One area where Apple has been incredibly aggressive — and Microsoft has been sorely lacking — is in actually producing and preparing high resolution content well in advance of the display technology. Apple new this was coming and for years have demanded icons, images, and artwork to be provided in high resolution. They developed assets for their own software in high resolution before retina displays ever hit the market. Contrast to this article where Microsoft's own Visual Studio (one of the "best cases" mentioned by this article) doesn't even have Hi-DPI icons. Microsoft's own software displays blurry icons and it's listed as a "best case." Apple also pushed Intel very hard on driver support for their integrated graphics. Rewriting the driver-level image scaling to ensure that discrete and integrated GPUs produced identical images, again before retina displays ever came on market, to allow for seamless switching between GPUs on their hardware. This sort of foresight was necessary to pull off the high density display introduction as smoothly as they did. Same goes for multiple monitors, which "just worked" when Apple introduced their high density displays. You could connect a regular monitor to your laptop and drag windows across. The DPI and art assets adjusted dynamically. This is something Windows is only just now getting around to fixing in version 8.1.
- Trufa 13y ago
  And my completely understaffed KDE does it beautifully.
maaarghk 13y ago
I have a 166 dpi laptop at the moment and yes, windows was pretty bad. Only recently found out about the dpi settings thanks to a commenter here. On another note I really want that laptop!!
darkr 13y ago
s/ a High-DPI desktop lifestyle can//
blueskin_ 13y ago
Is this guy having a laugh? Every time I've upgraded my monitor, I've found it easier. If you don't want a window to be wider than a certain point, don't make it wider. Myself, whenever I see apple users, I see them with these tiny narrow windows with nothing else on screen, which I have never understood. That said, I always value vertical resolution - I have never bought a 1920x1080 monitor as 1600x1200 is so much nicer, or 1920x1200 for the wider aspect ratio.
- redial 13y ago
  I guess you didn't read what he wrote. He is not complaining about the windows being to wide, he is complaining about the scaling that Windows 8 applies when it detects a High DPI screen, that makes every element inside a window either too large or too small, or sometimes both, breaking the original design and fluidity of the application and rendering it unusable. And your point about Apple users..well, I don't know what was your point about Apple users.
  - pmelendez 13y ago
    His point about mac users is that they tend to divide their screens in tiles while windows users tend to maximize the windows and switch between them. I found myself doing that on a mac too (I used to have a machine of each OS on my desktop) and was mostly because I never get used to the dock or exposé or even the way MacOS maximize windows
    - redial 13y ago
      I don't think that is what he wrote, but anyway, what you say has to do with how each OS works and neither is inherently bad. I do think however that the way Windows maximizes applications is more consistent, which is always better. Maybe that is why on a Mac one tends not to maximize a window as often as on Windows.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  Neither 1920x1080 nor 1600x1200 monitors are HiDPI, unless you're running them on a 10" laptop
bluedino 13y ago
Isn't the credit due to the choice by Apple (NeXT, actually) to go with Display Postscript? I'm sure they figured that as amazing as the resolutions of the original NeXT monitor was (1120×832 in 1988), in the future it would be greatly exceeded. Not to mention they wanted to be able to use the same routines to draw to a 300 or 600dpi printed paper as a 72dpi or whatever monitors were at the time.
- wmf 13y ago
  OS X has never used Display Postscript (partly because they probably didn't want to pay license fees to Adobe and partly because in a composited environment with client-side rendering there's no need to marshal drawing commands into text that looks like Forth). The OS X UI is full of bitmaps that had to be redrawn for retina.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Quartz2D, but the same idea.
js2 13y ago
Adobe everything. Well at least Adobe is consistent. The Flash Installer is awful on OS X as well. For example, say you've disabled the translucent menu bar - you'll notice it's drawn translucent when the Flash Installer is the foreground app. (Nevermind the fact that the installer is a just an annoying wrapper around the OS X installer that seems to do nothing more than force you to quit your open browsers before it will continue. With some digging you can actually find where it's downloaded the real installer pkg, double-click that pkg to install it, then quit the wrapper.)
- jasomill 13y ago
  Is the Flash installer running as a different user? Menu bar translucency can be set per-user and translucent is the default, so if, e.g., you run an OS X GUI app as root using sudo, and haven't disabled translucency for root, you'll see this behavior.
modeless 13y ago
The Windows DPI scaling control panel has DPI scaling bugs: http://i.imgur.com/zi80IhG.png http://i.imgur.com/zi80IhG.png That's all you need to know about high DPI support in Windows, in a nutshell.
spitfire 13y ago
I always liked what SGI Irix did. From the get go the desktop was all vector based. So you could run at 800x600 or 1280x1024 and either way things would look normal. Both OS-X and Windows solutions are a hack.
- 0x0 13y ago
  How did icons and stuff look, then? I thought vectors aren't the silver bullet they are made up to be especially for small/lowres graphics. Case in point, all the crazyness with fonts and hinting etc to make sure they look good in 12px.
  - mrpippy 13y ago
    The icons were vectors, but typically drawn at an isometric view and combined with other components (like the "sheet of paper"/"magic carpet" underneath apps). When you click once to select the app, the paper turns yellow. When you double click, the paper back and up behind the icon. A screenshot of the Icon Catalog: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/dynaweb_docs/0650/SGI_Admin/books/PCP_UAG/sgi_html/figures/a12193.gif http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/dynaweb_docs/0650/SGI_Admin/... And the docs for IconSmith, used to draw icons: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi/0650/bks/SGI_Developer/books/IIDsktp_IG/sgi_html/ch12.html http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi/0650/... And Motif was used for all the widgets, I guess that would make it vector-based.
OrwellianChild 13y ago
As someone who prefers high-DPI screens for workflow management across programs (spreadsheets, web layout, graphic design, etc.), this scaling problem in programs is a frequent frustration. Particularly working with media (DSLR images or 1080p video), it is difficult to scale GUI to a readable level while viewing the media itself at an un-scaled 1:1 pixel level. Do any editing suites for photo/video do this well? I'm talking about an un-scaled video window with a GUI that scales/wraps to an arbitrary window/screen size...
danudey 13y ago
Changing your DPI settings on Windows can cause all kinds of strange issues. I had a problem a few years back where my Windows 7 gaming theatre PC thing I had set up and connected to my 1080p TV wouldn't work quite right; specifically Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't launch, and would crash on loading. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, and googling was no help until I stumbled across the dumbest advice I'd ever seen: change the text scaling. Once I set it back to 100%, the game loaded fine. Frustrating, because at 100% I couldn't read any of the other text, which meant that if I wanted to play the game I basically had to navigate by icon and give up on reading dialogue boxes unless I wanted to sit on my coffee table instead of my couch.
nycticorax 13y ago
It's funny that, in an article describing issues with a high-DPI display, the author never explicitly says the size of the screen (e.g. in inches), or the DPI. He just tells us it's 3200x1800. In case you were wondering, the display on the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro is a 13.3", 16:9, 276 DPI display. Personally, I find this description more immediately useful than saying that it's a 13.3", 3200x1800 display.

188 points by henrik_w 13y ago

pilif 13y ago

you can say what you want about Apple in general, but they way they "fixed" this issue with the retina macs is so much better than what windows is doing. Windows has had the DPI selector ever since 3.1 (or even 3.0), but because nobody traditionally tweaked the settings, nobody bothered to make their apps look right and because nobody bothered to make the apps look right, nobody tweaked the settings because running higher DPI modes was breaking apps all over the place. Mac OS did this too - I think in the 10.4 timeframe there was an option to actually switch into a higher DPI mode and many of the OS-internal UI assets were vector images. They probably noticed that it will never work out, so they opted to go for a hack: With the exact quadrupling of the resolution, we got a solution that works mostly transparently for the applications. They still think they are drawing with a one-pixel resolution, so the burden of getting this right moved from the app makers to the OS maker. Even if an application has no modifications for retina displays, it will look mostly right (minus some blurring issues for pixel art). There will be no scaling issues, no texts will be cropped and everything will be scaled by the same factor. If you want to 'optimize' your app for retina, all you do is provide higher resolution bitmaps and you're mostly fine. The exception is some text-editors (sublime) and browsers (chrome) that were doing some manual text rendering, not relying on the OS API. These had to be fixed manually, but there really weren't that many applications like that. Yes, the way Windows does it is probably more "purist". Yes, the way Windows does it allows for arbitrary scaling factors (also sub 200%). But it doesn't work in practice. Yes. The Apple solution is a hack. Yes, it doesn't allow scaling to arbitrary factors. Yes, providing 2x bitmaps instead of one vector image is annoying. But it works in practice. On a retina mac, you'd never see the issues the OP complained about seeing on their Windows machine. What you get there might be superior from a technical standpoint, but it all boils down to an ugly half-working mess because developers just don't bother to get it right. I'm not excluding myself here. I've done a few windows apps and I f'ed up high dpi modes as many times as everybody else - also because my development environment (Delphi) made some assumptions that just didn't work well with high-dpi modes. Getting HDPI right on Windows (Desktop): Really hard and thus not worth it for most developers. Getting HDPI right on the Mac: Trivially easy.

swombat 13y ago
Mac does this even better. It does allow arbitrary scaling - for some definitions of arbitrary. For example, my MBPR 13" is set to the setting between "Best (Retina)" (which is the exact 2x, 1280x800 I think) and "More space") (which is 1.52x, 1680x1050), so I get 1.77x the space (1440x900). You control the DPI there and everything remains nice and sharp. Apps aren't even aware of this scaling, so everything works perfectly well.
- pilif 13y ago
  Yeah. But the virtual resolutions are fixed depending on the screen. There's no way to arbitrarily set a virtual resolution and the OS only offers this for screens it knows (see the MacPro Review from anandtech where they tried to enable HDPI with that 4K display: the os only offered the 2x mode). That's why I wouldn't call that arbitrary scaling. If they could offer it using their method, I'm sure they would.
  - 4ad 13y ago
    It's not exposed in the settings, but it can scale to any apparent resolution. There are various 3rd party programs that can set any apparent resolution for you. And of course, you can see this without any 3rd party software if you connect it to a monitor or projector with a weird resolution and enable mirror mode.
- eropple 13y ago
  I get what you're saying, but this is probably not a great way to think about it because it isn't arbitrary scaling, it's arbitrary backbuffer resizing. The way this works internally is to render to a HiDPI buffer at 1680x1050 Cocoa points (mapping pixels:points at 2:1). It's still @2x, the buffer just gets downsampled afterwards and the pixel density is high enough that it's difficult to tell in practice.
lmm 13y ago
In fairness, high-DPI screens on Windows are a new thing. If (and I realize it's a big if) apps get fixed over the next couple of years to handle different DPI settings, then the end result will be a lot more usable for e.g. vision-impaired users who want to use a higher DPI setting than the default.

msy 13y ago

Can we get 'on windows' added to the title? None of this is about high-DPI/Retina displays in general, it's just Windows and Windows ecosystem issues

panacea 13y ago
It's humorous that at the end of his article he asks: > "Do you have any examples of high-DPI frustration on the Desktop? Upload them to ImgUr.com and link to them in the comments!" Yeah... your blog post looks like shit on my MacBook Pro... all your screenshots are blurry messes.
- shanselman 13y ago
  Because I don't have x2 PNGs for all the screenshots? Don't then all screenshots look lousy for you? They do for my Retina PC.
- Filligree 13y ago
  Huh, they look fine on my MBPr. Because I'm using Chrome? It has a very good sharpening filter.
  - panacea 13y ago
    Wow... night and day compared with Safari. Can't for the life of me find details about the different approaches via search. Any links to why the browsers differ?
    - Filligree 13y ago
      Google implemented a sharpening filter in Chrome(ium), Apple didn't for Safari. That's it.

zokier 13y ago

I guess the best way to solve this would be to (partially) ignore the dpi awareness flag in applications and instead apply a series of heuristics and white/blacklists (with user override) for determining if applications truly are hidpi capable. That would be bit of a pita for the applications that actually do support hidpi properly now and might get still bitmap scaled, but that would be just a temporary issue.

rbanffy 13y ago
What bothers me is that this crisis has been obvious since well before Apple started releasing their Retina screens on mobile devices. X has 75 dpi and 100 dpi fonts for a reason and we had 2D acceleration on every decent computer for what? 15 years? We've been using pixels as size units for no reason other than laziness.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Vector rendering is still not advanced enough to completely (or even mostly) replace bitmaps. Until they are, we'll have to redline our bitmaps for each resolution manually. It's not just a matter of laziness.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    > Vector rendering is still not advanced enough to completely (or even mostly) replace bitmaps. Wait, what?!? Vector rendering matured before bitmaps were common place. They are faster and use less memory, that's why programmers of the 70's and 80's loved to use them. Bitmaps are easier. That's the only reason people use them. And only in a world where everybody gets images on the same size and resolution.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Your information is just plain wrong. My wife does a lot of pixel redlining at her job: the artifacts they produce are all done in Illustrator, a vector program. And believe me, they would love to leave them as vectors...less work for them! However, they must be converted to bitmaps and manually redlined to eliminate sub-pixel alignment problems. Bitmaps are not easier, otherwise the designers would be cranking out pixels directly in Photoshop and not Illustrator. The fact that NO ONE has produced a decent general purpose vector renderer that avoids pixel artifacts, even a non real-time one, means that my wife will be redlining for quite a few more years. Even font rendering (arguably simpler than icons) requires substantial hinting to be effectively resolution independent.

riquito 13y ago

What's the situation on GNU/Linux?

benjaminwootton 13y ago
I had the same question. A 3200x1800 resolution on a laptop sounds wonderful!
- kolme 13y ago
  As an owner of a ASUS Zenbook I can confirm it is a pleasure, almost orgasmic, to program on such resolutions :)
rbanffy 13y ago
Well... X knows about dpi for ages. Unfortunately, people have been using pixel-based shortcuts for ages too for almost everything. The way Apple used to "fix" it is curious considering NeXT was, AFAIK, dpi-aware from the start.
- joosters 13y ago
  Not so curious. As numerous comments here show, just about every display subsystem (be it X, Mac OS or Windows) has been DPI-aware for some time, but the 3rd party software that runs on these systems has made woeful use of it. Apple's fix gave consistent, reliable results.
lvillani 13y ago
Some basic support was introduced in Gnome 3.10 (and Gtk+) (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMDY) thanks to some Chromebook Pixels donated by individuals and Intel (http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-donations-to-assist-with-high-definition-support/ http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/07/gnome-receives-hardware-do...). After googling for about five seconds I found a review and the TL;DR is "it kinda works, but there are bugs" (like Windows, see http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270 http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3270). Never tried first hand, hope to have a chance with the Retina MacBook Pro I'm buying at the end of March.

CaRDiaK 13y ago

I got IntelliJ running really slick and smooth in QHD+. Set the compatability to disable scaling for hidpi. Then just set the text in settings to be 26pt. I know have a retina looking IDE on my Ativ Book 9 Plus.

latitude 13y ago

Just to be clear - supporting High-DPI on Windows is not as simple as adding scaled up resources. Instead, it is an absolutely royal pain. For one, you can't just throw hires bitmaps into a resource section of .exe and expect them to magically work. There needs to be code that looks at current DPI and picks matching bitmap. For two, standard DPI levels are 96, 120, 144 and 192, but guess what? All other values in between and above 192 are game too. In fact, there's a nice little slider in the Control Panel that encourages you to put it somewhere in between. This means that your code either needs to rescale bitmaps to match these odd DPIs or use the largest one that fits. In either case the result will look like butt. For three - the dialog layout. If your dialogs have text that's longer than 3-4 words, the chances are that it will either overflow, underflow or wrap differently under different DPIs. This in turn means that you need to test dialog appearance with at least 4 different font sizes and Tahoma 8px for Windows XP. Do you know how hard it is to word a longish sentence so that it would fill about the same space with all 5 combinations? Really damn hard and very time consuming. But wait! There's more. Every app icon needs to exist in at least 9 sizes, like so - http://imgur.com/5Pe2ZV0 http://imgur.com/5Pe2ZV0 - and this would still miss some cases where Windows will scale an arbitrary chosen icon image and use it. It really is a mess. However this is not something unexpected if you've been writing for Windows for a while. This mess is a routine.

madeofpalk 13y ago
> For three - the dialog layout. If your dialogs have text that's longer than 3-4 words, the chances are that it will either overflow, underflow or wrap differently under different DPIs. This in turn means that you need to test dialog appearance with at least 4 different font sizes and Tahoma 8px for Windows XP. Do you know how hard it is to word a longish sentence so that it would fill about the same space with all 5 combinations? Really damn hard and very time consuming. I don't understand that one. If the text is going to be a different size because it's scaled with the DPI, then hasnt the dialog itself scaled equally as well?
- latitude 13y ago
  All sizes in dialog templates are indeed specified in "dialog units", which are based on the metrics of the dialog's font. So in theory if you are to double the font size, all dialog elements would just double in size and all will be well. In practice, this is not sufficiently accurate to accommodate text size differences when going from one font/size to another. It's just too crude. For example - http://imgur.com/STtd8OQ http://imgur.com/STtd8OQ Top is SegoeUI/9pt, standard for DPI of 96. Middle is SegoeUI/10pt, standard for DPI of 125. Bottom is Tahoma/8pt, standard for XP at 96. See how bottom two trim "practice"? That shouldn't be happening, but it does.

tux10 13y ago

This is one of the biggest reason I just can't move away from my regular DPI laptop. Every time I have tried a HiDPI display with Windows it is painful. Text looks great but icons and widgets look like shit. Things get better with every new version of Windows but Microsoft have been promising true DPI independence since Vista yet things are still crap.

ZoFreX 13y ago
Back in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 I remember this stuff actually working quite well, a lot of people I knew were running Windows with non-default DPI settings. As newer versions came out, and also as people started using third party GUI toolkits more and more, things started getting less consistent.
- kolme 13y ago
  I think those old settings only concern fonts. Icons and other pixel-measured things would still look ridiculously small (making it a mess of small-things-with-big-fonts).
- tanzam75 13y ago
  Windows was originally designed to be DPI-independent. After all, Windows 1.0 had to run on 320x200 CGA adapters -- complete with non-square pixels.
philliphaydon 13y ago
I run Windows 8.1 on a 15" MBP/r and it looks great. Stop whinging about non-existent problems.

Aardwolf 13y ago

Why are names like "High-DPI" used? There was a time when 320x200 graphics with 256 colors was amazing. Would 800x600 have been considered "high DPI" back then? Or in the time were people were playing Duke Nukem 3D at 640x480 pixels, would they have considered 1920x1280 to be "high DPI"? Windows has transitioned all the way from 640x480 in Windows 3.11 to the resolutions of today, why would there be a problem with just another step up? What is "high" DPI today? What will it be tomorrow?

thornjm 13y ago
Perhaps because we reaching a point where our eyes can longer perceive the individual pixels that we really have reached maximum resolution. Is there any benefit from higher resolution displays?
- mas644 13y ago
  there will always be those hardcore "videophiles" that will claim they can see the pixels even at a nanoscale ;)
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  One advantage of high-density displays you sometimes see mentioned is that "we won't need to use anti-aliasing / sub-pixel rendering!" However at the common "high" density used in cellphones these days, 320+ DPI or so, artifacts in non-AA fonts are still visible (not always, or to everybody, but sometimes anyway). So, at least, there are some cases where higher-density than today could yield some benefit.
  - jbverschoor 13y ago
    I've turned off subpixel anti aliasing on my macbook pro retina. Net step would indeed be disabling anti aliasing
- rayiner 13y ago
  The ~235 ppi of the Retina display probably isn't there yet. The human eye is really a nifty organ. For example, it increases the spatial resolution of perception above the density of the rods/cones by sampling from slightly different viewpoints and integrating over time. See: http://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html http://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html. Also, there is the fact that you can move your face closer to the screen to look at something small. The eye can resolve over 800 ppi at 4". Finally, the fact that the eye can resolve say 300 ppi at a particular distance doesn't mean that's the best resolution for the underlying screen. If you want to render without tricks like anti-aliasing, you want to have enough resolution so that you avoid visible artifacts. E.g. imagine rendering two adjacent thin diagonal lines separated by 0.3 arc-minutes (the spatial resolution of the eye). You want enough resolution so that you can render those lines without their touching anywhere.

workbench 13y ago

Honestly don't know what you were expecting, Windows devs have NEVER cared about UI.

ZoFreX 13y ago

One of the most depressing areas of Windows to look at is the various control panel screens. Some of them, I kid you not, will show different bits of text in up to three different sizes. If Windows itself doesn't deal with different DPIs correctly, what kind of example does that set for application developers? Another application that definitely deserves mentioning is Chrome. It looks absolutely terrible. It's really blurry and browsing the web for even a couple of minutes really strains my eyes. If you run high DPI Windows, you're going to need a different browser than Chrome (Firefox looks fine but unsurprisingly does not perform so well at such a high resolution. Internet Explorer is actually not a bad choice - high res and fast)

ghusbands 13y ago
If you can stand to have tiny tabs, set the compatibility mode for Chrome to disable high-DPI scaling and set the default zoom in the browser options to something like 175%. It's a trick that works with many apps.
yummysoup 13y ago
In Windows 8.1 you can override the scaling for individual apps through their properties dialogs. Set Chrome to not scale, then set the zoom within Chrome to be > 100%. The url bar and tabs will be a bit small but the page content will look good.
- wvenable 13y ago
  TIL. I upgraded to Windows 8.1 but I didn't know about this. Anything Java doesn't handle high DPI and will simply be doubled and is a blurry mess. I actually turned off DPI scaling just because of Java but if I can control it on a per-application basis that would be preferable.
- ZoFreX 13y ago
  Awesome tip, thank you. I have an 8.1 license but have to install Windows 7 first, and hadn't bothered with the extra time to upgrade it yet. I know what I will be doing this weekend :)
13y ago

forrestthewoods 13y ago

I'm actually impressed that windows apps support it at all. I didn't realize it could actually work properly if programs took the time to do it right. With High-DPI monitors finally coming out I'd expect dramatically improved support moving forward.

0x0 13y ago

It's pretty amazing that Adobe is doing particularly bad. Keepers of pdf and postscript, you would think they knew all about fonts and dpi.

tanzam75 13y ago
> It's pretty amazing that Adobe is doing particularly bad. Adobe has historically been bad at playing well with Windows. They like to reimplement large parts of the UI.

codeulike 13y ago

Remote desktop is really annoying on high dpi screens - the client cant scale up (although it can scale down) so you end up with a tiny view of your server.

nettletea 13y ago

I can't even use my Windows 8.0 on my 32 inch TV that is 1080 sitting a couple of metres away, while keeping the resolution and boosting all the accessibility settings to the max. Even the metro Apps I can't use. I'd need a 50ft display! It's another facet of display/accessibility issues. I had high hopes after Media Centre, that Windows would get this right. And bought Windows 8.0 specifically for this purpose. Disappointing. I'm forever going over to the TV and my neck hates it. Personally I think part of the solution is to change the menuing system, breaking it out from the window. If I can at least use the menus/controls on apps I have a good chance of using them.

teh_klev 13y ago
Wierd, I've got my Windows 8.0 laptop hooked up to my 40" Samsung 1080p telly (bought in 2007) and it all looks good, even from ~3m away...and that's using just the VGA input (Dell didn't stretch to a DVI port on their cheapo Vostro 1720 range back in the day).
- nettletea 13y ago
  Well your eye sight is way better than mine. Metro apps are almost usable, the desktop is barely usable (I have to walk over to the set, and that's with the text size increased. I have a very small (not titchy) living room.
  - math0ne 13y ago
    That doesn't sound right. There is a special setting that lets you change the size of metro apps, have you tried adjusting that?
    - nettletea 13y ago
      Yes.

ghusbands 13y ago

I've had the pleasure of using a high-DPI display on Windows 7 for a while, now. There are some tricks that help significantly: 1. Calibrate ClearType to use as little color as possible (use the system magnifier to help); this way, when apps get scaled the text is just blurry rather than blurry with odd color-fringing. 2. For apps that are incompatible but suitably configurable, set their compatibility mode to disable HiDPI scaling and then set their font sizes (or default zoom) to be larger. This works well for Chrome and Skype, at least. 3. For those times when you momentarily have trouble, remember that the windows key and the plus key will zoom your whole desktop.

pdkl95 13y ago

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h... This is a few years old now, but is still one of the better explanations of the issues involved in modern font rasterization, with emphasis on how Microsoft's likely held back the entire industry by only realistically supporting widget fonts at the standard 96ppi. Really, anything other than the stock Arial 10pt/96ppi is going to cause layout issues. In an effort to very-aggressively hint that font so it looks consistent, they throw out horizontal accuracy by rounding to pixel boundaries. Per-letter. Ouch. The best part of the paper, though, is this image that moves the sentence to the right exactly 1/10 pixel each line: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/sample_arial_1tenth_shift.png http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/sample_...

interpol_p 13y ago

One area where Apple has been incredibly aggressive — and Microsoft has been sorely lacking — is in actually producing and preparing high resolution content well in advance of the display technology. Apple new this was coming and for years have demanded icons, images, and artwork to be provided in high resolution. They developed assets for their own software in high resolution before retina displays ever hit the market. Contrast to this article where Microsoft's own Visual Studio (one of the "best cases" mentioned by this article) doesn't even have Hi-DPI icons. Microsoft's own software displays blurry icons and it's listed as a "best case." Apple also pushed Intel very hard on driver support for their integrated graphics. Rewriting the driver-level image scaling to ensure that discrete and integrated GPUs produced identical images, again before retina displays ever came on market, to allow for seamless switching between GPUs on their hardware. This sort of foresight was necessary to pull off the high density display introduction as smoothly as they did. Same goes for multiple monitors, which "just worked" when Apple introduced their high density displays. You could connect a regular monitor to your laptop and drag windows across. The DPI and art assets adjusted dynamically. This is something Windows is only just now getting around to fixing in version 8.1.

Trufa 13y ago
And my completely understaffed KDE does it beautifully.

maaarghk 13y ago

I have a 166 dpi laptop at the moment and yes, windows was pretty bad. Only recently found out about the dpi settings thanks to a commenter here. On another note I really want that laptop!!

darkr 13y ago

s/ a High-DPI desktop lifestyle can//

blueskin_ 13y ago

Is this guy having a laugh? Every time I've upgraded my monitor, I've found it easier. If you don't want a window to be wider than a certain point, don't make it wider. Myself, whenever I see apple users, I see them with these tiny narrow windows with nothing else on screen, which I have never understood. That said, I always value vertical resolution - I have never bought a 1920x1080 monitor as 1600x1200 is so much nicer, or 1920x1200 for the wider aspect ratio.

redial 13y ago
I guess you didn't read what he wrote. He is not complaining about the windows being to wide, he is complaining about the scaling that Windows 8 applies when it detects a High DPI screen, that makes every element inside a window either too large or too small, or sometimes both, breaking the original design and fluidity of the application and rendering it unusable. And your point about Apple users..well, I don't know what was your point about Apple users.
- pmelendez 13y ago
  His point about mac users is that they tend to divide their screens in tiles while windows users tend to maximize the windows and switch between them. I found myself doing that on a mac too (I used to have a machine of each OS on my desktop) and was mostly because I never get used to the dock or exposé or even the way MacOS maximize windows
  - redial 13y ago
    I don't think that is what he wrote, but anyway, what you say has to do with how each OS works and neither is inherently bad. I do think however that the way Windows maximizes applications is more consistent, which is always better. Maybe that is why on a Mac one tends not to maximize a window as often as on Windows.
kalleboo 13y ago
Neither 1920x1080 nor 1600x1200 monitors are HiDPI, unless you're running them on a 10" laptop

bluedino 13y ago

Isn't the credit due to the choice by Apple (NeXT, actually) to go with Display Postscript? I'm sure they figured that as amazing as the resolutions of the original NeXT monitor was (1120×832 in 1988), in the future it would be greatly exceeded. Not to mention they wanted to be able to use the same routines to draw to a 300 or 600dpi printed paper as a 72dpi or whatever monitors were at the time.

wmf 13y ago
OS X has never used Display Postscript (partly because they probably didn't want to pay license fees to Adobe and partly because in a composited environment with client-side rendering there's no need to marshal drawing commands into text that looks like Forth). The OS X UI is full of bitmaps that had to be redrawn for retina.
- bluedino 13y ago
  Quartz2D, but the same idea.

js2 13y ago

Adobe everything. Well at least Adobe is consistent. The Flash Installer is awful on OS X as well. For example, say you've disabled the translucent menu bar - you'll notice it's drawn translucent when the Flash Installer is the foreground app. (Nevermind the fact that the installer is a just an annoying wrapper around the OS X installer that seems to do nothing more than force you to quit your open browsers before it will continue. With some digging you can actually find where it's downloaded the real installer pkg, double-click that pkg to install it, then quit the wrapper.)

jasomill 13y ago
Is the Flash installer running as a different user? Menu bar translucency can be set per-user and translucent is the default, so if, e.g., you run an OS X GUI app as root using sudo, and haven't disabled translucency for root, you'll see this behavior.

modeless 13y ago

The Windows DPI scaling control panel has DPI scaling bugs: http://i.imgur.com/zi80IhG.png http://i.imgur.com/zi80IhG.png That's all you need to know about high DPI support in Windows, in a nutshell.

spitfire 13y ago

I always liked what SGI Irix did. From the get go the desktop was all vector based. So you could run at 800x600 or 1280x1024 and either way things would look normal. Both OS-X and Windows solutions are a hack.

0x0 13y ago
How did icons and stuff look, then? I thought vectors aren't the silver bullet they are made up to be especially for small/lowres graphics. Case in point, all the crazyness with fonts and hinting etc to make sure they look good in 12px.
- mrpippy 13y ago
  The icons were vectors, but typically drawn at an isometric view and combined with other components (like the "sheet of paper"/"magic carpet" underneath apps). When you click once to select the app, the paper turns yellow. When you double click, the paper back and up behind the icon. A screenshot of the Icon Catalog: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/dynaweb_docs/0650/SGI_Admin/books/PCP_UAG/sgi_html/figures/a12193.gif http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/dynaweb_docs/0650/SGI_Admin/... And the docs for IconSmith, used to draw icons: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi/0650/bks/SGI_Developer/books/IIDsktp_IG/sgi_html/ch12.html http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi/0650/... And Motif was used for all the widgets, I guess that would make it vector-based.

OrwellianChild 13y ago

As someone who prefers high-DPI screens for workflow management across programs (spreadsheets, web layout, graphic design, etc.), this scaling problem in programs is a frequent frustration. Particularly working with media (DSLR images or 1080p video), it is difficult to scale GUI to a readable level while viewing the media itself at an un-scaled 1:1 pixel level. Do any editing suites for photo/video do this well? I'm talking about an un-scaled video window with a GUI that scales/wraps to an arbitrary window/screen size...

danudey 13y ago

Changing your DPI settings on Windows can cause all kinds of strange issues. I had a problem a few years back where my Windows 7 gaming theatre PC thing I had set up and connected to my 1080p TV wouldn't work quite right; specifically Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't launch, and would crash on loading. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, and googling was no help until I stumbled across the dumbest advice I'd ever seen: change the text scaling. Once I set it back to 100%, the game loaded fine. Frustrating, because at 100% I couldn't read any of the other text, which meant that if I wanted to play the game I basically had to navigate by icon and give up on reading dialogue boxes unless I wanted to sit on my coffee table instead of my couch.

nycticorax 13y ago

It's funny that, in an article describing issues with a high-DPI display, the author never explicitly says the size of the screen (e.g. in inches), or the DPI. He just tells us it's 3200x1800. In case you were wondering, the display on the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro is a 13.3", 16:9, 276 DPI display. Personally, I find this description more immediately useful than saying that it's a 13.3", 3200x1800 display.