waffle

In the middle of July, I proposed a date by which people could have resolution-independent applications out the door. That date was today. There wasn’t any significant adoption of the idea, but I never stopped holding it as a personal goal for myself.

So, how am I personally doing?

• Hex Color Picker is fully resolution independent. I don’t do any custom drawing at all, and the icon I use is usable up to 128 x 128. There’s not really much to do here.

• ThisService is fully resolution independent of my own volition. Everything custom drawn is drawn in code and scales perfectly to any size. The icon is still not a Leopard icon supporting a 512 x 512 version, but that’ll be fixed in the next release.

• Monocle is almost resolution independent. The window resizing code in the Preferences panel doesn’t differentiate between points and pixels and deals with both the window frame and the content view’s frame in the same unit, which is a big no-no. Most images are large which means that they can be scaled down to the right size, but not all. An update will be coming out, and addressing the bugs will be an important part of that update.

• Gmail+Growl… well, Gmail+Growl is old. Oooold. I’m working on its successor which will have paid attention to all of this, but I don’t actually know how Gmail+Growl 2.0 (the current version) fares because I’ve been using the next version for quite a while.

I hoped I’d be able to release updates and reach my personal goal, but things have been hectic and I simply haven’t been able to do that so far. This is pretty academic for now, and there’s no penalty for coming in late if your definition of ‘late’ is today, but having at least thought about it is worth a lot. Apple has said to expect high-resolution displays in 2008, and that’s not too far off now.

Fellow developers: how are your apps doing?