I get the feeling that you don't quite know what it is. Resolution independence is simple being able to have displays with high pixel density without having everything on the screen be super-small.
Think of it this way: look at an inch of screen space on your screen. This is a square that's roughly a hundred by a hundred pixels, which is an inch because the density of most Apple displays is 100px/inch, where for every inch you measure across the screen, that's 100 pixels end-to-end.
Now, imagine if the density were 300px/inch: that the pixels are so small that it takes 300 of them to form the same inch as the 100 on the other display. This results in gorgeously seamless display quality, where it's nearly impossible to see individual pixels because there are so many of them per square inch, over 90,000 versus the current 10,000.
But now imagine this: look at the red, yellow, and green buttons at the upper-left hand corner of each Mac OS X window. These are each about 15 pixels tall and 15 pixels wide.
On your 100px/inch display, that means they're a bit under a sixth of an inch when displayed onscreen.
On a 300px/inch display though, they'd be just a few millimeters and nearly impossible to use!
Thus it's necessary for Mac OS X and other operating systems to have a way of changing all interface elements onscreen to be bigger or smaller, independent of the resolution, so what works just fine on a standard display won't be microscopic on a high-density display.
For example, the More Info button in Tiger's Column View is vector-based
Incorrect. OS X does not use any vector-based widgets. Rather, with Tiger and Leopard, Apple has been introducing much-higher-resolution widgets, to the point that you simply can't tell any more that they're scaled pixel graphics.
Well, you could sort of say it's vector-based because it uses a live font for the text instead of rasterizing it. But the same applies to pretty much all text in Mac OS X, since all interface elements with text on them are editable in the Interface Builder.
Incorrect. OS X does not use any vector-based widgets. Rather, with Tiger and Leopard, Apple has been introducing much-higher-resolution widgets, to the point that you simply can't tell any more that they're scaled pixel graphics.
Not everything is defined in terms of bitmaps. A large part of the OS uses vector commands. If you do something like drawLine(0,30,30,30), then you have just executed a vector command and much in the operating does stuff like this. In fact the only things that don't use vector operations are things were it is much easier to draw a picture, and aren't likey to be well suited to vector operations, like icons for example. In also happens that some things are converted from vector to a bitmap if this yields performance improvements, but this is likely done on the fly and cached as necessary.
The fact that the final presentation is a massive bitmap in the graphics card, doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of rasterization going on. What changed between true raster systems and currents systems, is that the rasterization is done on the graphics card and not the screen.
Okay, totally kidding, but DAMN! Could you imagine a display with a resolution so fine that it looked like a photograph? Think about it! I mean, even now with 300 DPI screens, we'd be nearing the 1MPixel range... oooooh!
Will this have a good effect or any effect on the Zoom feature in Mac OS X? You know the nifty one with the Mighty mouse scrollball. In other words will text be clear when you Zoom in on it?
Will this have a good effect or any effect on the Zoom feature in Mac OS X? You know the nifty one with the Mighty mouse scrollball. In other words will text be clear when you Zoom in on it?
Resolution independence doesn't help there. But higher resolution displays would.
As far as I've seen its fine for Apple to have wait on resolution independence. Pixel density has not been a big problem. I imagine this signals pixel densities in Apple displays will greatly increase, 1920x1200 in the 17" MBP coming soon.
When someone showed me what resolution independence in Windows XP looked like, I was not impressed at all. Its fine for Apple to wait for the technology to mature and actually become usable.
It isn't only the OS that needs it to work well. You might note that Apple has said that it would be more work for developers to do this for their programs. If they don't do it properly, it could actually look worse.
I believe that I do, however, I thought I'd heard that Apple had put a version of Resolution Independence in Tiger (but didn't turn it on) for developers to test their apps against.
So I figured that apps would have to be rewritten to specifically take advantage of the feature. If it's just enabled on everything by default, then my earlier speculation about CS3 is unwarranted.
Yup : currently everything assumes 72dpi (dots (aka pixels) per inch). This means that if your window defines its width as 144 dpi, then on a screen that has a resolution of 72dpi your window will be 2 inches wide. If you you increase the DPI, then you reduce the visual size of your window. For example if your screen has 144 pixels per inch, then your window is now only 1 inch wide, when it was intended to be 2 inches wide.
Resolution indepence would define lengths differently. This means instead of indicating your window takes up 144 pixels, you would say it is 2 inches (or cenimetres if you want) wide. This means that no matter the resolution of your screen you window would stay the same size - you could use a ruler and find that your window is two inches wide, whether your screen is 72dpi or 144dpi.
Actually, it would use percentages. There is no way for the software to know how big the screen is, only the number of pixels available to it.
yeah. i'm not getting why adobe would be all that interested in resolution independence. i think it's more of a system feature that would just apply to cocoa apps without any additional work. it's not as if this technology would make photoshop capable of blowing up rasters any better. and the publishing apps are already resolution independant with their vectors. photoshop can't be resolution independant because the resolution is already built into the raster file.
Resolution independence doesn't help there. But higher resolution displays would.
no, actually i think that's exactly where it would be of benefit. the display zooming in osx is a nice feature but it looks like hell right now because all the text and widgets are displayed as rasters. so display zoom up to the toolbar or in a webpage and the text gets bitmappy looking. resolution independence would keep all of those elements perfectly smooth at any magnification.
I believe that I do, however, I thought I'd heard that Apple had put a version of Resolution Independence in Tiger (but didn't turn it on) for developers to test their apps against.
So I figured that apps would have to be rewritten to specifically take advantage of the feature. If it's just enabled on everything by default, then my earlier speculation about CS3 is unwarranted.
It's really something that only applies to interface elements. It's not like some new kind of vector feature, or CoreImage II or something like that. Just icons and buttons that scale without getting ugly.
Mostly everything in the computer world is going to move to resolution-independence at some point, including the internet.
We can already see things starting to slowly creep toward that in forward-looking statements and posts by Dave Hyatt of the Safari team.
Adobe really does need to be planning for this - but not in the way you're thinking . . .
Eventually, Vector or scalable-based imagery/fonts, etc are going to commonplace and interchangable (photos will still have a fixed size for the forseeable future, though).
Meaning that at some point Illustrator is either going to become more important or it will merge or overlap with Photoshop to a larger degree.
Honestly, right now, our tools for building webpages are terribly rudimentary - everything you're comping in Photoshop is mostly hacked together - it's not based on any reality other than how things should ideally look before the Dev builds stuff.
I can't wait to see the new generation of Adobe apps - I just hope Adobe can hold it together with their face firmly squared towards marketing, rather than actually developing their applications . . .
Most likely, in the next few years (if they're smart) Adobe will ditch the marketing guru CEO and hire a CEO with a background in Development. They will have to get back to what they should really be doing, which is making their software leaps and bounds better.
We're gonna be waiting a while for other industries and applications to catch up to Apple's move into Res-I.
Mostly everything in the computer world is going to move to resolution-independence at some point, including the internet.
We can already see things starting to slowly creep toward that in forward-looking statements and posts by Dave Hyatt of the Safari team.
Adobe really does need to be planning for this - but not in the way you're thinking . . .
Eventually, Vector or scalable-based imagery/fonts, etc are going to commonplace and interchangable (photos will still have a fixed size for the forseeable future, though).
Meaning that at some point Illustrator is either going to become more important or it will merge or overlap with Photoshop to a larger degree.
Honestly, right now, our tools for building webpages are terribly rudimentary - everything you're comping in Photoshop is mostly hacked together - it's not based on any reality other than how things should ideally look before the Dev builds stuff.
I can't wait to see the new generation of Adobe apps - I just hope Adobe can hold it together with their face firmly squared towards marketing, rather than actually developing their applications . . .
Most likely, in the next few years (if they're smart) Adobe will ditch the marketing guru CEO and hire a CEO with a background in Development. They will have to get back to what they should really be doing, which is making their software leaps and bounds better.
We're gonna be waiting a while for other industries and applications to catch up to Apple's move into Res-I.
(or whatever cute term we should make up for it)
There is a great deal of vector capability in PS right now, and the next version will have even more.
Wouldn't Photoshop have a problem with resolution independence? If Leopard let's me set-up my display as taking advantage of 150ppi resolution screen then what is Photoshop to do with it? Especially at 100 % magnification which is supposed to be 1 pixel = 1 pixel display -- wouldn't that mean that a 72 ppi photo would take up roughly half the screen real estate that the same photo would take up on a 72 ppi screen? It would seem that editing a 72 ppi icon for a website would become very difficult on a screen that was running at 150 ppi.
i agree. once they went to vector text and started using placed art and smart objects it's become much easier to preserve quality in a lot of photoshop projects.
Comments
Cool. Very cool.
I get the feeling that you don't quite know what it is. Resolution independence is simple being able to have displays with high pixel density without having everything on the screen be super-small.
Think of it this way: look at an inch of screen space on your screen. This is a square that's roughly a hundred by a hundred pixels, which is an inch because the density of most Apple displays is 100px/inch, where for every inch you measure across the screen, that's 100 pixels end-to-end.
Now, imagine if the density were 300px/inch: that the pixels are so small that it takes 300 of them to form the same inch as the 100 on the other display. This results in gorgeously seamless display quality, where it's nearly impossible to see individual pixels because there are so many of them per square inch, over 90,000 versus the current 10,000.
But now imagine this: look at the red, yellow, and green buttons at the upper-left hand corner of each Mac OS X window. These are each about 15 pixels tall and 15 pixels wide.
On your 100px/inch display, that means they're a bit under a sixth of an inch when displayed onscreen.
On a 300px/inch display though, they'd be just a few millimeters and nearly impossible to use!
Thus it's necessary for Mac OS X and other operating systems to have a way of changing all interface elements onscreen to be bigger or smaller, independent of the resolution, so what works just fine on a standard display won't be microscopic on a high-density display.
Hope you get it.
For example, the More Info button in Tiger's Column View is vector-based
Incorrect. OS X does not use any vector-based widgets. Rather, with Tiger and Leopard, Apple has been introducing much-higher-resolution widgets, to the point that you simply can't tell any more that they're scaled pixel graphics.
Incorrect. OS X does not use any vector-based widgets. Rather, with Tiger and Leopard, Apple has been introducing much-higher-resolution widgets, to the point that you simply can't tell any more that they're scaled pixel graphics.
Not everything is defined in terms of bitmaps. A large part of the OS uses vector commands. If you do something like drawLine(0,30,30,30), then you have just executed a vector command and much in the operating does stuff like this. In fact the only things that don't use vector operations are things were it is much easier to draw a picture, and aren't likey to be well suited to vector operations, like icons for example. In also happens that some things are converted from vector to a bitmap if this yields performance improvements, but this is likely done on the fly and cached as necessary.
The fact that the final presentation is a massive bitmap in the graphics card, doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of rasterization going on. What changed between true raster systems and currents systems, is that the rasterization is done on the graphics card and not the screen.
Photo-quality displays next Tuesday!
Okay, totally kidding, but DAMN! Could you imagine a display with a resolution so fine that it looked like a photograph? Think about it! I mean, even now with 300 DPI screens, we'd be nearing the 1MPixel range... oooooh!
Photoshop and FinalCut users rejoyce!
-Clive
Will this have a good effect or any effect on the Zoom feature in Mac OS X? You know the nifty one with the Mighty mouse scrollball. In other words will text be clear when you Zoom in on it?
Resolution independence doesn't help there. But higher resolution displays would.
As far as I've seen its fine for Apple to have wait on resolution independence. Pixel density has not been a big problem. I imagine this signals pixel densities in Apple displays will greatly increase, 1920x1200 in the 17" MBP coming soon.
When someone showed me what resolution independence in Windows XP looked like, I was not impressed at all. Its fine for Apple to wait for the technology to mature and actually become usable.
It isn't only the OS that needs it to work well. You might note that Apple has said that it would be more work for developers to do this for their programs. If they don't do it properly, it could actually look worse.
Can't wait to get my hands on some 300dpi displays!
You'll wait a long time.
...tutorial...
Hope you get it.
I believe that I do, however, I thought I'd heard that Apple had put a version of Resolution Independence in Tiger (but didn't turn it on) for developers to test their apps against.
So I figured that apps would have to be rewritten to specifically take advantage of the feature. If it's just enabled on everything by default, then my earlier speculation about CS3 is unwarranted.
Yup
Resolution indepence would define lengths differently. This means instead of indicating your window takes up 144 pixels, you would say it is 2 inches (or cenimetres if you want) wide. This means that no matter the resolution of your screen you window would stay the same size - you could use a ruler and find that your window is two inches wide, whether your screen is 72dpi or 144dpi.
Actually, it would use percentages. There is no way for the software to know how big the screen is, only the number of pixels available to it.
So would this mean you could build applications with vector-based interfaces?
In most cases, you would have to. The only things that can't be defined that way are raster images. They would have to be interpolated.
yeah. i'm not getting why adobe would be all that interested in resolution independence. i think it's more of a system feature that would just apply to cocoa apps without any additional work. it's not as if this technology would make photoshop capable of blowing up rasters any better. and the publishing apps are already resolution independant with their vectors. photoshop can't be resolution independant because the resolution is already built into the raster file.
For menus.
Resolution independence doesn't help there. But higher resolution displays would.
no, actually i think that's exactly where it would be of benefit. the display zooming in osx is a nice feature but it looks like hell right now because all the text and widgets are displayed as rasters. so display zoom up to the toolbar or in a webpage and the text gets bitmappy looking. resolution independence would keep all of those elements perfectly smooth at any magnification.
I believe that I do, however, I thought I'd heard that Apple had put a version of Resolution Independence in Tiger (but didn't turn it on) for developers to test their apps against.
So I figured that apps would have to be rewritten to specifically take advantage of the feature. If it's just enabled on everything by default, then my earlier speculation about CS3 is unwarranted.
It's really something that only applies to interface elements. It's not like some new kind of vector feature, or CoreImage II or something like that. Just icons and buttons that scale without getting ugly.
We can already see things starting to slowly creep toward that in forward-looking statements and posts by Dave Hyatt of the Safari team.
Adobe really does need to be planning for this - but not in the way you're thinking . . .
Eventually, Vector or scalable-based imagery/fonts, etc are going to commonplace and interchangable (photos will still have a fixed size for the forseeable future, though).
Meaning that at some point Illustrator is either going to become more important or it will merge or overlap with Photoshop to a larger degree.
Honestly, right now, our tools for building webpages are terribly rudimentary - everything you're comping in Photoshop is mostly hacked together - it's not based on any reality other than how things should ideally look before the Dev builds stuff.
I can't wait to see the new generation of Adobe apps - I just hope Adobe can hold it together with their face firmly squared towards marketing, rather than actually developing their applications . . .
Most likely, in the next few years (if they're smart) Adobe will ditch the marketing guru CEO and hire a CEO with a background in Development. They will have to get back to what they should really be doing, which is making their software leaps and bounds better.
We're gonna be waiting a while for other industries and applications to catch up to Apple's move into Res-I.
(or whatever cute term we should make up for it)
Mostly everything in the computer world is going to move to resolution-independence at some point, including the internet.
We can already see things starting to slowly creep toward that in forward-looking statements and posts by Dave Hyatt of the Safari team.
Adobe really does need to be planning for this - but not in the way you're thinking . . .
Eventually, Vector or scalable-based imagery/fonts, etc are going to commonplace and interchangable (photos will still have a fixed size for the forseeable future, though).
Meaning that at some point Illustrator is either going to become more important or it will merge or overlap with Photoshop to a larger degree.
Honestly, right now, our tools for building webpages are terribly rudimentary - everything you're comping in Photoshop is mostly hacked together - it's not based on any reality other than how things should ideally look before the Dev builds stuff.
I can't wait to see the new generation of Adobe apps - I just hope Adobe can hold it together with their face firmly squared towards marketing, rather than actually developing their applications . . .
Most likely, in the next few years (if they're smart) Adobe will ditch the marketing guru CEO and hire a CEO with a background in Development. They will have to get back to what they should really be doing, which is making their software leaps and bounds better.
We're gonna be waiting a while for other industries and applications to catch up to Apple's move into Res-I.
(or whatever cute term we should make up for it)
There is a great deal of vector capability in PS right now, and the next version will have even more.
Wouldn't Photoshop have a problem with resolution independence? If Leopard let's me set-up my display as taking advantage of 150ppi resolution screen then what is Photoshop to do with it? Especially at 100 % magnification which is supposed to be 1 pixel = 1 pixel display -- wouldn't that mean that a 72 ppi photo would take up roughly half the screen real estate that the same photo would take up on a 72 ppi screen? It would seem that editing a 72 ppi icon for a website would become very difficult on a screen that was running at 150 ppi.
If I don't get it, please explain it to me.