But the reason I’m sad is that this wonderful hack was short lived: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vfBq6vg409Zky-IQ7ne-Yy7o...
My pet theory is that macOS is going to pull in a bunch of iOS code and iOS has never had subpixel AA.
For anyone who wants to see whats coming when Mojave gets released without subpixel AA, I made a few comparison screenshots on a non-Retina display:
iTerm2 dark subpixel AA enabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3.1.7.png
iTerm2 dark subpixel AA disabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3_1_20170924-nightly....
iTerm2 light subpixel AA enabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3.1.7-light.png
iTerm2 light subpixel AA disabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3_1_20170924-nightly-...
On Retina screens, I don't see much of a difference:
iTerm2 light subpixel AA enabled on Retina display: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3.1.7-light-retina.pn...
iTerm2 light subpixel AA disabled on Retina display: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3_1_20170924-nightly-...
Consider the 3 and 4th images, the "on light" AA and non-AA versions… Look at line number 10, the "let arr1 =…" line. Look at the vertical stroke of the "l" of "let". In the anti aliased version there is a red glow on the left side and a blue-green glow on the right when you zoom in. On the non anti-aliased one there is not such glow. Now lets lay that into pixels on a scanline…
RGBRGBR_________GBRGBRGB subpixel AA
RGBRGB_________RGBRGBRGB non-subpixel AA
If we turn that back into what the computer abstracts as pixels we get…
RGB RGB R__ ___ ___ _GB RGB RGB subpixel AA (see R and GB? halos)
RGB RGB ___ ___ ___ RGB RGB RGB non-subpixel AA
Where I notice it the most is on the curly quotes and parentheses. Without AA they look... harsh I guess? Or maybe blocky. You notice the vertical lines making up the curves more. You also lose some of the definition around letters - for example without AA the dot on the "i" is much less noticeable.
On the dark theme it doesn't look nearly as bad, I have a really hard time seeing the difference there at all. Maybe that's because they're scaled differently? Or maybe dark themes just don't need it as much?
I’m noticing this misunderstanding quite a bit in the thread. None of those images have antialiasing disabled. What’s been disabled is subpixel antialiasing. So those images are comparing subpixel antialiasing and greyscale antialiasing.
Opinions between the two are mixed:
I’m one of the people that hates greyscale antialiasing (I find it makes text look fuzzier) and prefer subpixel antialiasing (which does a much better job of preserving the intended shape of the font glyphs).
On the other side, there are people who hate subpixel antialiasing (because they can see the colour fringes on the glyphs) and prefer greyscale antialiasing. Here’s an example from 1897235235 lower down in the thread:
“This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily.
Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.”
Now if antialiasing was actually fully disabled, the difference would be extremely obvious, to say the least.
I wonder if this is part of the reason why I can't really tell the difference in the dark mode pictures, at least without zooming in all the way. I guess the colors from subpixel antialiasing would be less noticable when overlayed or transitioning from dark to light rather than from light to dark?
> the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind.
Oh crud, this never occurred to me. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I remind myself that red/green doesn't work for everyone, I still find myself forgetting about it all the time.
Some Apple engineer said on reddit that it's because subpixel AA is not so useful in Retinas and HiDPI, but slows down processing and complicates pipelines.
So it's part of the move to Metal and increasing graphics performance, even if it means external lo-res monitors will suffer.
Rendering in monochrome is also faster than true 32-bit color, but we use 32-bit color because it provides a better experience to the user who is the ultimate consumer of the graphics pipeline.
It's almost as of it's a trade-off and monochrome so laughingly doesn't cut it, that it's a totally contrived counter example. Almost.
I could replace my old monitors, but they still work well with good colour and brightness, so it's not exactly environmentally considerate, or even slightly necessary.
Adding colour has added very little to UX aside from true-colour icons, the UX itself is essentially the same. Colour is used as a theme on top of a UI perfectly recognisable, and much the same as, mono and 4 colour interfaces of the 80s and 90s.
A current dense desktop monitor seems to be around 160ppi, so 8-bit grayscale would be around 280ppi, which is starting to approach a low-end printer.
Mobiles and tablets have such high resolution monitors nowadays they probably run without subpixel AA at all…
Edit: personally I value simple and precise language. Constructs such as those mentioned in the Wikipedia article may convey similar meaning but the fact that they exist means that they allow for some variation in meaning and color which is unnecessary in this case.
The original statement is clear from context, since the literal meaning is semantically impossible (monitors are incapable of suffering).
Metonym is just a linguistic term. Such terms are not constrained to describe high uses of language by great masters of writing. They are merely names for specific constructs or linguistic phenomena.
A drunken sailor swearing at someone at 3am could be using a metonym just as easily as Wallace Stevens.
> I released a build of iTerm2 last year that accidentally disabled subpixel AA and everyone flipped out. People definitely notice.
On a Retina display at least I find that the most striking difference is that most text appears to have a lighter weight. Maybe that's the difference people are perceiving, rather than color fringing or whatever?
That's PR-speak. Translation "It works acceptably well for all pixel layouts, and it is easier for us to implement".