waffle

Here’s an idea for everyone putting out Cocoa software (and that includes me): Release versions of your apps that are resolution-independent by November 29th.

Since it should be obvious why you should go resolution-independent, I will spend the rest of this post explaining “why November 29th?”

• It is day 333 of the year. 300 dpi is deemed a reasonable resolution for text, and one almost all inkjet printers can do, but day 300 is still in October, and wouldn’t give enough testing time if you assume a Leopard launch on the last Friday that month, which is the day before. Day 333 is the next date to be easily remembered.

• You have plenty of time until then to prepare all your images and other resources.

• November 29th is a week after US Thanksgiving, and if you’re selling software, it means it’s in the start of the christmas shopping season.

• Leopard will have been out for at least a month by November 29th, so developers without access to the beta will have had a month to test their software in the first Mac OS X version to be truly resolution-independent.

• Apple has said to “get ready for resolution independence in 2008″. This smells like high-DPI displays at Macworld Expo in January 2008. This gives developers a month yet after the first release (if they release on November 29th) to iron out bugs.