Apple seeds new Mac OS X Lion preview with Reading List, Mission Control - Page 3

A little perspective? By cheap innuendo, you endeavor to denigrate what I wrote. This is dishonest, although not the least bit atypical for what passes for acceptable behavior on forums such as this.

It never ceases to amaze me how you can spell out something in a manner so perfectly plain that no semi-intelligent person could possibly fail to comprehend, and yet there are always people who come along and make comments as sophomoric as the comment you made.

Yes, I am angry, and my angry over this intolerable situation has increased each time that Apple has released a new version of the OS without fixing this very real, substantive problem. The font smoothing nonsense is the lesser of the two evils, and that was apparent in what I wrote, yet you took the liberty of flipping it around. The fact that you did that speaks directly to your honesty.

The only thing that you might be right about is that I am probably wasting my time for discussing these problems here. But the irony is that your post is the evidence for this. The reason for posting this here is the vain expectation that a some of the sheep out there will wake up and start to think for themselves. But your posts is evidence that this is not likely to happen.

I will try to make it even simpler, so that you might be able to understand it. Here goes:

On my high-resolution monitor, much of the stuff that appears on the screen is far smaller than is optimal. In fact, it is just tiny, tiny, tiny. The finer the resolution of the screen, the more tiny stuff is. This is manifestly a problem. It could not POSSIBLY be more obvious that this is a problem. Yet you are manifestly incapable of "getting it".

The mentality that you demonstrated with regards to the arbitrary restriction on the font size at which you can disable font smoothing is precisely the same mentality that evidently prevails at Apple. Because you personally do not see the advantage of being able to disable, you evidently think that there should be an arbitrary limitation to prevent anyone who sees differently from being able to disable it, for font sizes larger than 12. You evidently are unable to understand that an arbitrary restriction of this sort is incapable of yielding any benefit for anyone. It is preposterous that any arbitrary restriction of this sort would exist. The font smoothing requires logic that is not applied when it is disabled. Some programmer who is unable to think at all clearly put this restriction in place, for no good reason whatsoever. This is a perfect example of the sort of mentality that many inexperienced programmers exhibit. The fact that you do not understand this is compelling evidence that if perchance you are a programmer, you are a very inexperienced programmer yet to develop a mature attitude toward software functionality. I don't know any other way to say it.


The thing that gets me is this: what sort of service do you think that you have given to anyone at all by writing something of the sort that you wrote? What is your purpose? In what way does a post such as the one you wrote potentially benefit anyone within the Apple user community? In what does it even potentially benefit you?

You are incorrect. Changing the screen resolution to something other than its native resolution has a horrible effect overall, and this is not the least bit acceptable as a means to address this problem. And I seriously doubt if Apple ever offered this capability in OS X. If they had, they would have kept it for the benefit not of applications, but for the benefit of the menu bar, and the windows that are managed by the system software. It is EXCEEDINGLY unlikely that they would have gone to the effort to develop this capability and after having done so they would have simply tossed it out. In fact, this suggestion is ludicrous at face value.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

The point you make regarding Apple's evident, present assumption being invalid is correct, and this is exactly what I also perceived within the first 30 seconds that I read the first article that turned up in the Google search. Your comments corroborate with what I inferred when I read that article: that rather than provide a flexible scaling capability, Apple has evidently cooked up a solution that will work well only for a very narrow range of physical pixel density, matching the physical density for "retinal display". It is as if someone decided that displays come in two varieties: "retinal display" and "displays that are not retinal displays". If this is what they have done, then they still have not done what they need to do. Physical pixel densities cover a broad gamut, and the solution should be flexible.

A useful analogy here is PDF files with embedded graphics. As long as the embedded graphic has sufficient inherent resolution, you can zoom in on the document and the graphic will remain sharp on the display. When you zoom in on the graphic, the graphic is mapped to a greater quantity of display pixels. This is precisely what you need to be able to do, no more and no less, with the menu bar and the text that appears in it, and all of the various windows that are presented under the control of system software, as opposed to a particular application. The mere fact that this capability exists for PDF files proposes, and has for a very long time, to anyone except for the people who defend Apple as if their own sense of personal self-worth depends on doing so, that this is the way that system-generated text and graphics for the display should be done.

I struggle with this because this is something that to me is perfectly self-evident. To me the present situation is not appreciably different from the problem that would exist if, upon buying a new printer with finer resolution, everything that I printed came out smaller. It is manifest to me that this is not acceptable. It is manifest to me that in order to deal in an adequately flexible way with the variety of native resolution that you find with printers, that a fully flexible approach to scaling is inherently necessary. To my way of thinking it is precisely the same with the monitor. There should be no forced correlation whatsoever between the physical pixel density of the screen and the physical size of text and graphics that appear on the screen, especially in the case of text and graphics placed on the screen by the system software.

To my way of thinking it is preposterous that something this obvious and fundamental should have to be explained here. It is manifestly the case that there are a lot of people here who simply take for granted that Apple is perfect, and who think that the way that Apple does something is always the way it should be done, and who, driven by this manner of thinking, have refuted what I have said. What I know to be true about these people is that if it were the other way around, i.e., if Apple did this the way it should be done and MS Windows did it the cheap way that Apple does it, these same people will immediately proclaim that it is obvious that this capability is absolutely essential and that the reason that MS doesn't have this capability is because MS are idiots. This is precisely what all the Apple-apologists would say. And they would gang up like a pack of wild dogs on anyone who dared to say otherwise.

Even though I abhor MS and Windows and hate to say anything that favors Windows over OSX, the fact is that Windows handles system-generated text and graphics in precisely this manner that is manifestly needed, and in fact Windows has done this for about as long as I can recall. I cannot even recall how far back you would have to go in the evolution of Windows to find the point in time when system-generated graphics were handled in a manner as crude as what Apple still thinks is adequate. I think it would have been at least fifteen years ago, back to the very earliest versions.

Nope. I am not the least bit confused. You are confused. Ah, but why would I say something this boorish to a complete stranger? Because he said it to me first? Nope. I try not to play that game. Rather, the reason is that I did not say anything whatsoever about subpixel rendering vs. anti-aliasing. Not a single, solitary word.

I really, really abhor comments of the sort that you made, that pretend to add clarification where in reality it is obfuscation. Pretentious, pretentious, pretentious. I abhor pretentiousness. Especially when someone's tendency toward pretentiousness is so uncontrolled that they insult strangers. When you write something like "You are confused ...", this should be based in substantive fact, not in something that you dreamed up in your head because you wanted to make it look like you knew more about something than someone else. In order for what you wrote to be sincere, you have have to start by defining the difference between sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing.

Here's an even more horrible thought: Lion is the last version of OS X as we know it. After that it will be a unified iOS.

We can't hide this under the carpet anymore, Resolution Independence is a real, evident, and grave shortcoming of the os and sugar coating with make this pill any easier to swallow...

Is there even one thread about resolution independence on any Windows forum anywhere?

It's quite evident that not only is this a vocal minority, it's a vocal minority that will cut people's heads off for even suggesting that they shut up about it because it's no more important than any of the other thousand fringe-case features that people want. Heck, there are a dozen or so other changes that Apple should be making before resolution independence.

Does anyone have problem with Quick Look locked at a small dimension? Anyway to fix it?

You're saying the dimensions of the window don't change when you cycle between images?

no there isn't because windows has ri, and no there aren't resolution independence is a must, I chuck my 27" inch imac and 11" air out the window otherwise.

No it doesn’t. WPF is nice and I wish Apple had it’s own intermediate option but this is not RI the way Apple tried to make an RI (and failed) and the way some early OSes did, ilke Amiga.

Does 10.7 include 32-bit kernels? If so, does it boot by default from a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel?

The system requirements for Lion are a 64-bit processor. This is probably mostly done for security reasons but there is likely some truth to simply trimming the R&D on the comparatively very few Intel Macs with 32-bit processors that were sold.

Lion does include the Open in 32-bit mode for apps just like Snow Leopard, but that, of course, doesnt have anything to do with the kernel, just thought Id mention it still be part of the future OS.

I thought I'd read somewhere on these forums people managing to boot in 32bit kernels. That may be disabled by the time it comes out, I'd imagine.

You've completely missed the point of the question.


Could you rewrite this to make sense? I think this is what I'm looking for, but I can't understand it.

Yeah, its possible, but with Preview 3 out and very stable* without any sign of support for CoreDuo chips I would say that Apple will not be supporting them.



* Well, I have had zero issues with it.

Hmm. I've had no trouble. You're running Preview 3, right? Launchpad is written well enough to be actually usable now, as opposed to any point in Preview 2.