This sure sounds an awful lot like vector-based graphics (such as what can be created in Adobe Illustrator or Flash) taking over the whole display, or to go back even farther, it sounds like EPS images for the entire display. I always thought EPS was a great format, but it seems that it is hardly, if ever, used today.
Well, I still think this sounds more like having different images for different resolutions (and that's what it looks like in the figure), but in any case, it just sounds like a mapping of UI elements to multiple methods of rendering based on the resolution. A fairly basic computer science data structure.
If they wanted to patent something for vector-based resolution independence, I thought they already owned all the NeXT Display PostScript stuff (i.e. over 15 years old).
Quote:
Maybe they can get a patent for this, but on the surface, it appears to me that the concepts for displaying graphics in a completely resizable manner, such as they are describing to achieve "resolution independence," have been around a very long time (as others have noted). Still, I can't wait to see if Leopard will look better on my Mac mini-driven TVs.
Mmmmm ... Leopard mini, big TV, resolution independence, hopefully a Blu-ray drive, now we're talking! iTV ... what iTV?
Resolution independence is vector graphics, but with the aide that Quartz will rasterize the view, on the fly as you scale the object.
Scalar factors with the vector make it straight forward; and since screens are dumb devices they don't know anything about vectors which requires the Window Server to coordinate with Quartz PDF primitives to do the work.
All text in the PDF user guides that came with the most recent version of Parallels are resolution independent.
I thought that was a feature of most PDFs. The main exception are the silly people and companies that post document scans as PDFs, or other text encoded as a raster image.
Say you have a line 1 inch long that is 1/72 of an inch thick. On Mac OS X (and Mac OS before it) that one inch line would be defined as 72 points long and one point thick since Mac OS X defines it point space (what you draw in) as having 72 points per inch.
Currently Mac OS X defines that one point maps to one pixel on a display.
So if you had a display that had 72 pixels per inch (physical pixels crammed into one inch of length along the display's surface) then a 72 point long line would appear to be 1 inch long on that display. Now if you had a display with 144 pixels per inch then a 72 point long line would appear to be 1/2 inch long on that display and on a 288 pixel per inch display it would appear to be 1/4 inch long.
So as you get displays that can cram more and more pixels per inch your on screen drawing will appear to be physically smaller and smaller unless you adjust the scale of what you are drawing. In other words as the fidelity of displays approaches that of common laser printers you need to adjust what you draw to use more pixels so it maintains the same appearance in terms of physical dimensions.
This is what resolution independent UI is about... Mac OS X in the near future will allow you to (or possibly automatically) set the scale factor for the visual environment to match the physical size of pixels of your display.
For example if you had a 144 pixel per inch display you would ideally set the scaling factor to 2x. That would mean a 72 point long line (aka 1 inch long line) that is 1 point tall would be displayed on your screen using a rectangle that is 144 pixels long (72 x 2) and 2 pixels tall (1 x 2). In other words that 1 inch long line would appear as 1 inch long on your display instead of just a half inch long and it would be displayed using twice as many pixels... which means you have a higher fidelity image.
It should be noted that since day one Mac OS X has utilized a resolution independent drawing environment (Quartz / Quartz2D) and that is how what you see on screen is appropriately scaled when you print it out on say a 600+ DPI printer without out much of a through by a programmer (at least for those using modern APIs based on Quartz or using Quartz directly). What Apple is currently doing is starting to utilizing this existing capability to scale what is drawn to the screen since screens are improving in DPI.
This sounds great, I am really looking forward to this...
As long as everyone is playing dirty, it is essential that Apple patent any innovations, regardless of whether or not they should be patented! Whether or not they should go chasing other people is another story, but at least they aren't getting screwed over or having to settle like they have had to in the past.
Actually I happened to patent the basic idea of the resolution independent UI one month before Apple - I first submitted it to the USPTO on May 31. 2004, and I see now that Apple's first appilcation on this subject was on June 24, 2004. This is not a joke.
So I guess I can now make a deal either with Microsoft or with Apple. Whichever one is going to be more reasonable.
Comments
This sure sounds an awful lot like vector-based graphics (such as what can be created in Adobe Illustrator or Flash) taking over the whole display, or to go back even farther, it sounds like EPS images for the entire display. I always thought EPS was a great format, but it seems that it is hardly, if ever, used today.
Well, I still think this sounds more like having different images for different resolutions (and that's what it looks like in the figure), but in any case, it just sounds like a mapping of UI elements to multiple methods of rendering based on the resolution. A fairly basic computer science data structure.
If they wanted to patent something for vector-based resolution independence, I thought they already owned all the NeXT Display PostScript stuff (i.e. over 15 years old).
Maybe they can get a patent for this, but on the surface, it appears to me that the concepts for displaying graphics in a completely resizable manner, such as they are describing to achieve "resolution independence," have been around a very long time (as others have noted). Still, I can't wait to see if Leopard will look better on my Mac mini-driven TVs.
Mmmmm ... Leopard mini, big TV, resolution independence, hopefully a Blu-ray drive, now we're talking! iTV ... what iTV?
Scalar factors with the vector make it straight forward; and since screens are dumb devices they don't know anything about vectors which requires the Window Server to coordinate with Quartz PDF primitives to do the work.
Chris
All text in the PDF user guides that came with the most recent version of Parallels are resolution independent.
I thought that was a feature of most PDFs. The main exception are the silly people and companies that post document scans as PDFs, or other text encoded as a raster image.
Currently Mac OS X defines that one point maps to one pixel on a display.
So if you had a display that had 72 pixels per inch (physical pixels crammed into one inch of length along the display's surface) then a 72 point long line would appear to be 1 inch long on that display. Now if you had a display with 144 pixels per inch then a 72 point long line would appear to be 1/2 inch long on that display and on a 288 pixel per inch display it would appear to be 1/4 inch long.
So as you get displays that can cram more and more pixels per inch your on screen drawing will appear to be physically smaller and smaller unless you adjust the scale of what you are drawing. In other words as the fidelity of displays approaches that of common laser printers you need to adjust what you draw to use more pixels so it maintains the same appearance in terms of physical dimensions.
This is what resolution independent UI is about... Mac OS X in the near future will allow you to (or possibly automatically) set the scale factor for the visual environment to match the physical size of pixels of your display.
For example if you had a 144 pixel per inch display you would ideally set the scaling factor to 2x. That would mean a 72 point long line (aka 1 inch long line) that is 1 point tall would be displayed on your screen using a rectangle that is 144 pixels long (72 x 2) and 2 pixels tall (1 x 2). In other words that 1 inch long line would appear as 1 inch long on your display instead of just a half inch long and it would be displayed using twice as many pixels... which means you have a higher fidelity image.
It should be noted that since day one Mac OS X has utilized a resolution independent drawing environment (Quartz / Quartz2D) and that is how what you see on screen is appropriately scaled when you print it out on say a 600+ DPI printer without out much of a through by a programmer (at least for those using modern APIs based on Quartz or using Quartz directly). What Apple is currently doing is starting to utilizing this existing capability to scale what is drawn to the screen since screens are improving in DPI.
From shawnce at Macrumors.
This sounds great, I am really looking forward to this...
As long as everyone is playing dirty, it is essential that Apple patent any innovations, regardless of whether or not they should be patented! Whether or not they should go chasing other people is another story, but at least they aren't getting screwed over or having to settle like they have had to in the past.
Actually I happened to patent the basic idea of the resolution independent UI one month before Apple - I first submitted it to the USPTO on May 31. 2004, and I see now that Apple's first appilcation on this subject was on June 24, 2004. This is not a joke.
So I guess I can now make a deal either with Microsoft or with Apple. Whichever one is going to be more reasonable.