Filed under: Macworld, Analysis / Opinion, Rumors, Software, Odds and ends, WWDC, Apple, Leopard
The case of the missing resolution independence
What the heck happened to resolution independence?In Gruber's review of the Powerbook a few years ago, he trumpeted the coming of a feature long evading the Mac faithful, a resolution independent interface. Others at the time expected the same thing to appear in Leopard: UI elements that were completely independent of the screen's resolution, and, finally, a fully scalable interface, and freedom from whatever screen you were working on. Higher resolutions without squeezing down the UI elements. And as we got closer to Leopard, more and more word went around that OS 10.5 would have it. At WWDC 2006, some developers even confirmed it. And Apple even filed a patent to get it done.
Except now it's November, Leopard is out, and resolution independence is nowhere to be found, at least at the user-accessible level. What gives?
To be fair to Apple, they've been quiet on it since around January of this year (ie. Macworld, when another little device took some attention away from Leopard). And resolution independence didn't appear on the Sparta list, either, so it's not like Apple lied straight out told us it would be in Leopard. It's not really a surprise to anyone that it's not in there, and that's why we haven't heard much about it since last week.
But if not Leopard, where? A resolution independent display wouldn't help so much on the iPhone or iPod (since those have fixed displays), but it might help on the rumored ultraportable-- maybe all of that work won't appear until Apple releases OS X on a screen that's unusual. Or if not there-- why? Why would Apple have been working on it, and then ditch the idea for this release entirely?
It's a strange case, and if the reason it's not in Leopard is because something went wrong, odds are we'll never know what happened (it's not very like Apple to admit when their plans go awry). The good news is that, as a few have pointed out, resolutions and UI elements are still a big deal for Apple, and they're still pushing hard to get the UI as clean and clear as possible. There are more vector graphics than ever in Leopard, and even if the coding still isn't there, the graphical groundwork is. Resolution independence is still on the radar, but it's unclear just where and how Apple plans to implement it.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Sherwin Zadeh said 3:26PM on 11-01-2007
I just read about this on Apple Developer Connection. Here's what they say:
Resolution Independence
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
The introduction of resolution independence may mean that there is work that you’ll need to do in order to make your application look as good as possible. For modern Cocoa applications, most of the work will center around raster-based resources. For older applications that use QuickDraw, more work will be required to replace QuickDraw-based calls with Quartz ones.
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frogbat said 3:29PM on 11-01-2007
i've read somewhere that there is support for it built into leopard and available to developers and that resolution independence really comes to play when screens start shipping in 100-200 ppi
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Al said 3:36PM on 11-01-2007
Mike, had you bothered to do some research for your post, or even read the excellent Ars Technica review of Leopard, you'd have found out that it is in Leopard, but it's not enabled by default as it's not quite finished.
The technology is called Core UI:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/10
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Steve Folly said 4:12PM on 11-01-2007
John Siracusa has a good write-up in his Leopard Review at Ars Technica : http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars (Quartz GL and CoreUI pages) . Basically, it's there and available to developers - things are moving forward, but no user-visible controls yet.
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Steve said 3:35PM on 11-01-2007
Yeah wtf is all this doom and gloom about. Resolution Independence is in Leopard right now, all controls, windows and text scale to different sizes and remain sharp.
Try it in terminal:
"defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 2.0"
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darcagn said 3:49PM on 11-01-2007
Yes, some functions of Resolution Independence are in Leopard. But they are just some functions: they don't work properly and they're hidden.
These same functions were also in Tiger, BEFORE Apple announced Resolution Independence for Leopard, so it's obvious that what's in Leopard is not the real deal...
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Mo said 3:53PM on 11-01-2007
Resolution independence is in both Tiger and Leopard, though it works a lot better in Leopard. In both cases, though, it's not *ready*. The code clearly works, but the resources (vectors, appropriate bitmaps, actual application UIs) aren't there yet.
Expect either Apple making more of a big deal about resolution independence to developers between now and around the 10.5.5 timeframe, or for them to announce a new range of Macs or Cinema displays that require an OS update for you to properly take advantage of them (or more accurately, the resolution independence).
Bear in mind that Apple pushing out major new aspects to its OS (ones which are important to developers but not necessarily big selling points) mid-cycle is not unheard of: just look at the PPC - Intel transition, which would never have sold operating systems, but DID sell Macs. The same applies here: resolution independence isn't going to make anybody pick up a boxed copy of Leopard, but it would sell a Mac if the hardware and software took advantage of each other properly. For that reason, there's no point in holding up the .0 release for it.
Contrary to popular belief, though, it IS important on the iPhone: the iPhone's display is 133DPI, if memory serves—a far cry from the 96DPI on desktop displays.
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KeynoteKen said 4:00PM on 11-01-2007
#4 My sentiments exactly. Sure, it was a long slog through all those pages at Ars, but it was well worth it to get an understanding of where things currently are. I recommend it to anyone who really wants to know what Apple's doing under the hood.
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ChrisC said 4:19PM on 11-01-2007
You can play with the scale factor from the Quartz Debug application, in the Developers tools (it's one of the performance tools).
Go in Tools menu and Show User Interface resolution, you'll have a slider to change the scale factor.
However, most of the applications (actually *all* the applications minus the Dock) needs to be restarted to be affected.
But this functionality is clearly not polished enough to be useful at a user level.
My bet is we'll have to wait for 10.6 to take full advantage of RI :-)
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Mike Overbo said 4:25PM on 11-01-2007
Mo: iPhone is 160 DPI.
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Michael Long said 4:42PM on 11-01-2007
I discussed this a few days ago. It's not that the technology isn't ready, it's that quite a few applications, including Apple's, are not ready to USE the technology.
You just can't impose resolution independance upon applications from the outside.
http://www.iSights.org/2007/10/no-resolution-i.html
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Charles Miller said 4:51PM on 11-01-2007
Resolution independence requires two things. The OS needs to provide APIs for scaling applications to suit different display DPIs, and the applications themselves need to be written to properly take advantage of those APIs. Apple only claimed Leopard would deliver the former (and it does).
What Apple never said was that Leopard would be ready for resolution-independent scaling at an application level. Third-party developers were given a deadline for delivering resolution independent apps that was significantly beyond the Leopard release-date, and this was even before the Leopard release was pushed back six months.
Even if Leopard did support Resolution Independence in the way this article is talking about, I doubt it would be exposed to the user. You'd plug in a high-DPI monitor and the OS would automatically scale the interface to suit it.
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Stephen Lang said 4:56PM on 11-01-2007
Regarding the iPhone- Resolution independence isn't important with the iPhone because the display is fixed at the same size and resolution (at least right now.)
The UI doesn't need to be resolution independence because there's only 1 resolution.
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required said 5:01PM on 11-01-2007
This seems like it will cause more problems than fixes at least initially. Then again maybe I'm over complicating it or thinking about it wrong. I always thought that Apple used 72dpi as a standard because it was based on print media (72pt is an inch tall). Measurements without a dependence on a standard seems really overwhelmingly complicated to envision. How biglittle?
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Brian said 5:01PM on 11-01-2007
I really hope that resolution independence comes soon, and doesn't go the way of 'Home On iPod'. I hate that the only supported way to make user interface elements bigger is to drop the resolution of the display - which, on an LCD, then makes everything fuzzy. It's just crazy that a computer with a 30" display has to either have everything too small to see, or fuzzy.
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required said 5:11PM on 11-01-2007
Brian, maybe you can help with my confusion. Did LCD displays break what was in essence resolution independence? I ask this because they have a fixed resolution whereas CRT displays do not.
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c.libre said 5:21PM on 11-01-2007
From the OP: "A resolution independent display wouldn't help so much on the iPhone or iPod (since those have fixed displays)"
Funny, I had assumed that the iPhone, with its high-DPI screen, had been one of the drivers for resolution independence in OS X. It seems like resolution independence support would make it easier for Apple to upgrade the screens used in future models of the iPhone or iPod.
Out of curiosity, how does Mac OS X handle situations with multiple monitors with varying DPIs? For example, if my laptop has a 72 DPI (or 100 or whatever) built-in screen and I attach a 200 DPI monitor, it's clear that increasing a global scaling multiplier isn't going to produce pleasing effects on the low-DPI screen.
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Bradford Chang said 6:03PM on 11-01-2007
I disagree. You know why the iPhone doesn't need resolution independence? The UI is designed for that screen depth. The only reason higher res displays reinforce the need for resolution independence is because the UI elements have been designed for lower resolution displays, therefore shrinking as DPI increases.
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sam said 6:16PM on 11-01-2007
You can buy a $400 gift card with cash .. hint hint.
This is silly. First of all, its not illegal to resell something you own. Apple is trying too hard to enforce their policy about what you can do with your property.
It IS, however, legal for Apple to refuse cash, even though that "all debts public and private" thing. Even though its legal, its still shady IMHO.
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sam said 6:18PM on 11-01-2007
Resolution independence seems to break everything.. After trying some of the stuff from above I now can no longer take screenshots using cmd+shift+4.
It breaks everything. I hate it.
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