The case of the missing resolution independence

#29. Of course it will. But you might need to logout for all being back to default.

Steve, will entering

"defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.0"

change RI back to normal?

Thank you

@16 (required) + 27 (Brian):

No, LCDs did NOT create this problem. They made it worse, yeah. But the problem is still there with CRTs. Even on a CRT, if you lower your resolution, you're just making all of the pixels bigger. Instead of blurry, text becomes blocky. That's a minor improvement at best. You're completely wasting the capabilities of your display.

With resolution independence you'll be making everything larger, but the pixels stay the same size. Text becomes smoother and clearer, not blockier. You'll see more detail in images than you would get by lowering your resolution. Things will look much better on both LCDs and CRTs if you want to make things larger than their normal size.

If you have a scroll ball (or wheel), hold down control and scroll to zoom in on your screen. It's bigger, but it's blocky and ugly.

Now increase the font size in your browser. That's what resolution independence does, except it does it for everything on the screen. Big difference.

I can't wait for a 200+ dpi display with resolution independence. Even if you have a hard time getting resolution independence now, I'm sure you'll get it when you see it. It'll look gorgeous.

@16 (required): Yes, LCD displays created the problem that resolution independence would fix. CRT displays can sync to any resolution, but LCDs have a fixed resolution, and trying to display 1024x768 full-screen on a 1280x960 display only leads to fuzziness.

It's much worse in the Windows world. Last night I was helping an elderly gentleman who just picked up a Samsung 30" display to use with Windows Vista, because he figured a large display would be easier to read. Problem is, at its native resolution, the text was WAY too small for him to read. And, at anything less than native resolution, Windows munged the text so it looked like fuzzy blobs that even made *my* eyes hurt.

Not that I understand this enough; but the comment earlier regarding zooming on the iPhone seemed to make sense--or did I just not understand the whole resolution independent thing? Also, would it matter that the iPod Touch and iPhone have different resolutions?

@22: Steve

"I like having my resolution set high enough that icons, lists, etc. are small; it allows me to view more information in one look on my laptop's screen. It does make text and other object small, and perhaps less readable though."

That's the whole point of resolution independance -- viewing more data at a higher resolution without sacrificing the viewability (sure, it's a word...) of your icons and menus...

I was unable to take screenshots after enabling Steve's command above, and removed the AppleDisplayScaleFactor key from this plist file and logged out. All working now.
~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

This is a bit off topic, but if you've read down the posts this far it may interest you.
I like having my resolution set high enough that icons, lists, etc. are small; it allows me to view more information in one look on my laptop's screen. It does make text and other object small, and perhaps less readable though.
A tip I've given to several people as a good functional compromise is to hold the ctrl button while manipulating the wheel or ball on the mouse. This zooms the screen, and you can also pan around while zoomed in by moving the mouse. Not without quality loss, but pretty effective little technique when you need it. Thought this was a common knowledge thing, but the people I've told had no idea you could do it.- st

some people seem confused, as evidenced by previous posts.

pre-res independence (ie. today) app interfaces are designed and coded with respect to pixels. there is the assumption that a 10 pixel image will draw to 10 pixels on the screen. if you have two 19" monitors one 100dpi and one 200dpi, apps see the second monitor being twice as big as the first, ie twice as many pixels (apps can maybe dig deeper to find the physical size, but its hard and i doubt many apps do anything useful with the info)

with res independence, apps will probably still designed in pixels, but with full expectation that those are virtual pixels that the OS will scale before getting to the screen. there will be new rules for designing graphic elements that work well in those situations. apps may instead see the 19" monitors as having the same # of virtual pixels, but the OS will scale differently so the 2nd monitor has twice the detail.

it sounds straight-forward, but it could get really confusing for every app developer unless apple gets it right and everyone has opportunity to adjust. tiger had some of the groundwork but i perhaps the infrastructure was not solid until leopard. so now its the polish, user experience, and the evangelism to get apps updated (which has gotten only slow starts before now at previous WWDC)

-smallduck

Safari in the iPhone has something similar to resolution independence already. When you zoom in or out of a web page the form elements scale appropriately. My guess is that all the form controls use the same technique Leopard uses to scale it's interface elements.