Upscaled UI for High Res Displays in OS X

Appleinsider hasan articledescribing 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 |TrackBack