resolution posts

Filed under: Macworld, Analysis / Opinion, Rumors, Software, Odds and ends, WWDC, Apple, Leopard

The case of the missing resolution independence

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Nov 1st, 2007

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?

Continue reading “The case of the missing resolution independence”

Tags: confirmation, detective-tuaw, developers, independence, leopard, macworld, on-the-case, resolution, resolution-indpendence, rumors, truth, ultraportable, wwdc

Filed under: iTS, Video

Newly resized iTS video content just a bad upsample?

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Sep 30th, 2006

It seems like not all larger iTunes Store videos are actually worth their new dimensions. Reader Paul did some investigating on the newly resized videos (i.e. - ones that were 320 x 240 before the new store, and are now 640 x 480), as a few seemed suspiciously like bad upsamples, rather than truly re-encoded masterpieces of H264 quality.

Unfortunately, for this investigation Paul had to reveal he is an Anastacia fan, but that isn't important right now (just kiddin' with you Paul). Engadget has put together a good post with example screenshots (like the one above) of upsampled content that looks worse than its smaller predecessors. Some of the videos look great - like Paul's Anastacia examples, but others like Madonna's and Elton John's vids ultimately take the more jagged route.

The thing I'm wondering is: who does the encoding? Apple, or the studios? This page at Apple's site for music labels interested in getting onto the store offers software called iTunes Producer to allow them to do the encoding, which makes me suspect this video upsampling issue could be the fault of the labels mistakenly assigning the video encoding and re-encoding work to some rookie intern.

This is about all we know for now; Apple I'm sure is unavailable for comment, but check out Engadget's post for more screenshots and details of what's going on here.

Tags: encoding, engadget, its, itunes, itunes7, resolution, store, upsample, video

Filed under: OS, Rumors, Software, WWDC

Will Australia get the first look at Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard?

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on May 30th, 2006

Tim Gaden (of Hawk Wings fame) has written an interesting article for his 'day job' column at APC Magazine about the possibility of our friends down under getting a first peek at Apple's forthcoming update to Mac OS X, 10.5 Leopard. Apparently, Apple has sent emails stating that they will be previewing the August WWDC during special seminars in Australian capitals during the month of June - nearly two months before the real WWDC takes the stage.

If this is true, it would be great to hear real details of what Leopard is going to bring, as opposed to mere rumors of a re-built and Spotlight-dependent Finder, Windows virtualization and resolution independence. Here's hoping our Australian neighbors can't keep secrets very well.

Tags: 2006, conference, developer, Finder, independence, Leopard, Mac, OS X, OsX, preview, resolution, rumor, rumors, seminar, software, Spotlight, WWDC

Filed under: OS, Software, Productivity

On resolution independence

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on May 21st, 2006

There is a lot of buzz and speculation floating around as to what we'll see in the Mac OS X 10.5 update that will be previewed (and I suspect released) at this August's World Wide Developer's Conference. One exciting 'fundamental feature' John Gruber hinted at last November has been mentioned again by a developer named Dustin MacDonald: resolution independence.

Gruber broke this concept down in a November '05 post titled Full Metal Jacket (under the Display heading), but to summarize: most of the dimensions of elements in Mac OS X (and other OSes to my knowledge) are defined in pixels - the menu bar is 22 px high, for example. This explains why things 'seem to look a little smaller' when you move from the 1024 x 768 dimensions of a 12" display to the 1440 x 900 resolution of the latest 15" PowerBook G4 or MacBook Pro displays. Conversely, if you decrease the resolution on the machine you're working on now, things will look a bit bigger; you have smaller resolution and fewer ppi (or dpi) on screen, so some elements change size. This can become a problem in the context of notebook displays and their resolutions - if you take the 15" MacBook Pro's resolution higher than 1440 x 900, things could become smaller than what many might consider usable (these same rules apply to Windows and I believe Linux as well). Further, you can't just keep increasing notebook display sizes like you can with desktop displays; I've heard of the 19" notebooks Engadget has come across, and I personally don't consider a 16 lb computer worthy of the 'portable' adjective.

Continue reading “On resolution independence”

Tags: 10.5, content, detail, dpi, independence, Leopard, ppi, resolution, rich, serif, size, WWDC

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