Problem: Some people turn off antialiasing, such as ClearType, in Windows, or make a big stink about antialiasing that doesn’t snap text to the pixel grid, among which are Mac OS X’s antialiasing (which “looks fat”) or WPF’s ClearType implementation (which admittedly looks inaccurate and wispy).
Why? They believe it makes the text look blurry.
Why? Smooth text looks better and is more legible, but the resolution doesn’t allow for text that is smooth on its own.
Why? Text that’s smooth on its own is smooth because of a higher resolution (c.f. printers, even crappy ones, but also high pixel pitch devices like the iPhone), and if you bumped up the resolution everything else would be smaller.
Why? Icons and window layouts have mostly been designed for the same resolution for over twenty years and look like crap when scaled up.
Why? Process inertia enabled by the same kind of people that, oh, say, spend their day complaining about blurry text.
Oh man. Toyota were on to something.
I kid, but only mostly. My second thought about the new taskbar in Windows 7 — and I guess you can figure out my first thought — was “You’re going to put alpha transparent icons down there? Above 16×16 in size? Really?” Many Windows programs are notoriously bad at providing new things like this. And many Windows programs overall are notoriously bad at providing anything new beyond what was in Windows 98. I’m speaking outside of my stereotype as a Mac owner, here; I’m speaking in my stereotype as a regular Windows user for the past 20 years, and a current Windows user and developer. The fact that it’s simply impossible to assemble an alpha transparent Windows icon with just the supplied image editor hacksaw in Visual Studio should tell you something.
The best thing that could happen to Windows would be a sea change. And I don’t mean that we all ape the Ribbon this week because it looks modern. I mean that this shit starts becoming important; at least important enough that you could actually begin to bearably use high DPI settings. And yes, I also do want a pony. I don’t have any illusions that this shit matters to even 20% of the Windows developers out there, even the serious ones. But I know what’s been going on on the Cupertino side of the fence for all these years. A high standard has been set and approaching something less than that is met with criticism, jeers and a bad reputation. This phenomenon has been reserved for the extreme and high-profile freaks in the Windows world, like Lotus Notes.
I’m hopeful, but for this to start happening, some people should stop asking themselves why they’d want to run in the direction of those freaks who want to make their text blurry and start looking at the bigger picture. Literally.
Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.
For the record, I independently invented the Five Whys method when I was six. My parents and teachers were not open to its obvious genius, though.
By Jens Ayton · 2008.12.14 11:22
We all invented a generalized form, called n-ary Whys (where n tends towards ∞), when we were six. Same thing with the concept of polling.
By Jesper · 2008.12.14 13:04
I have no idea what this article is about.
By Brian Skreeg · 2008.12.15 00:08
Maybe you should try reading it.
But as a figurative yellow marker, the main point is this: a prominent (but not the sole) reason why we don’t have high resolution (by which I mean more pixels per inch) displays is because the steps that need to be taken to get to there from here involve convincing people that the steps will be worthwhile because of the end result, and these people tend to have an unlucky habit of assuming that since the intermediary steps aren’t optimal or in fact at times worse than “it used to be”, therefore apparently progress isn’t an option and we should just sit on our hands and bitch about the current situation or rewind everything.
You could perhaps see why I spent all those paragraphs writing that instead.
By Jesper · 2008.12.15 01:06