Continuing our new The Little Things series that highlights the often-overlooked polish and underrated features that make Mac OS X such a joy to use, I thought I'd highlight one of those 'guy behind the guy' features that makes A le's OS so gorgeous: font anti-aliasing. Nerdy, I know, but check out the scree hot: Windows, even XP, doe 't su ort this feature system-wide like Mac OS X does, and it shows. Type looks like garbage in everything from desktop ico to most a licatio and their menus on Windows. Mac OS X, on the other hand, su orts anti-aliased fonts from the ground up (to my knowledge), so everything from System Preferences to desktop ico , text editors to iLife and more are incredibly legible and lickable.
Some call it a minor detail, but given the undeniably pleasant usability this brings to the OS, I would argue it's one of those trademark additio that A le's engineers don't receive enough credit for.
Update: As many people pointed out Windows does, in fact, have a similar feature called 'ClearType,' which some co ider superior to OS X's (though it is a matter of taste). The key difference is that ClearType is disabled by default, which in effect mea that most Windows users have no idea that it is even an option. Another case of A le paying attention to the little details, though Vista will have this feature enabled by default.
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