Upscaled UI for High Res Displays in OS X
Appleinsider has an article describing the possibility of Tiger offering developers, and eventually users, the ability to scale up the display elements of the user interface. This is a two fold good thing. For people with failing vision, they can upscale the UI in a very nice looking way (as opposed to just zooming the screen at present). But the real reason is the advent of true high resolution displays that exceed 150 pixels per inch. Given than Mac OS X currently only functions at 72ppi, those of us with cinema displays are seeing UI elements smaller than we should be.
Appleinsider is suggesting that this scaling is going to be handled by quartz, based on high resolution raster images. While this may work in the short term, what would really be required for UI design of the future is moving away from raster elements in the UI completely and moving instead to vector elements which can scale smoothy to any size.
But this is definitely a step in the right direction, and an indication that high res displays are on their way.
Posted by Joe Mullins at August 24, 2004 09:26 AM | TrackBackit's funny, i submitted a bug request some time ago asking for something along these lines. when this was mentioned at the WWDC Mac OS X State of the union, i was the only one in the room clapping. (people would clap for other... not yet leaked.. new features, so i figured i'd clap for the one i liked)
Posted by: Nate Friedman at August 25, 2004 03:18 PMYeah, this is one of those features that people don't really get yet because it's just not a subject they are thinking about.
High res displays are just now becoming a reality, and thankfully Apple is planning ahead, even though many developers are not.
Posted by: Joe Mullins at August 26, 2004 10:43 AMFunny, isn't this one of those features that Windows(tm) has had for years? Not that I ever had a sexy enough display to need to take advantage of larger UI elements, but it seems like this is long overdue.
Posted by: Peter Norby at August 30, 2004 09:35 PMhttp://techgoesboom.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/262
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