On resolution independence

There is a lot of buzz and eculation floating around as to what we'll see in the Mac OS X 10.5 update that will be previewed (and I su ect 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 Di lay heading), but to summarize: most of the dime io 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 explai why things 'seem to look a little smaller' when you move from the 1024 x 768 dime io of a 12" di lay to the 1440 x 900 resolution of the latest 15" PowerBook G4 or MacBook Pro di lays. 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 i (or dpi) on screen, so some elements change size. This can become a problem in the context of notebook di lays and their resolutio - if you take the 15" MacBook Pro's resolution higher than 1440 x 900, things could become smaller than what many might co ider usable (these same rules a ly to Windows and I believe Linux as well). Further, you can't just keep increasing notebook di lay sizes like you can with desktop di lay I've heard of the 19" notebooks Engadget has come acro , and I personally don't co ider a 16 lb computer worthy of the 'portable' adjective.

This idea of resolution independence, as you might glean from the name, is a new concept (as far as I know) that restructures how element sizes are defined in Mac OS X, ideally making it po ible for higher resolutio without forcing users to squint at everything they do on-screen. This also could usher in much higher i resolutio which could bring computer di lays that much closer to properly di laying high-detail objects.

The reason I'm mentioning all this is that Dustin MacDonald, the aforementioned developer, has echoed Gruber's sentiment that evidence of A le's move to resolution independence is already present in 10.4, and he goes a little further to explain some of these elements for those who really wa a get their nerd on.

Bottom line: it sounds like developers are getting excited about some of the potential fundamental changes that the upcoming 10.5 update could usher in for the Mac OS X experience. This most likely will have a significant impact on Mac OS X's ability to di lay complex things like anti-aliased objects and serif fonts with a richne and accuracy that could finally match the real world. I agree with Dustin: WWDC can't come soon enough.