New Macs’ resolutions: The wide range of Mac Display DPI | Hacker News Reader

New Macs’ resolutions: The wide range of Mac Display DPI

leancrew.com

23 pointsghurlman14 comments

I wish laptops would go back to 4:3 aspect ratio. The trend for widescreen leaves me wanting for more vertical space. 800px or 900px vertical is too short and requires more scrolling. Yet, it's not wide enough to really fit 2 application windows side by side.

It's only really good for movies. Certainly not good for web browsing unless you want to read long sentences across the screen.

I'm glad MBP17 is wide. 1920x1200, ticks all the boxes. No, it's not too big or heavy, remember that the MBP15 is 15.4".

All Mac users should also do themselves a favour and set their Dock to auto-hide.

I have mine autohide on the left hand side. Only use the doc to show running applications, use quicksilver to launch.

I always keep the Dock hidden, even on my 2560x1440 iMac. I launch applications from Spotlight¹ and switch between them by +tab.

About the widescreen aspect ratio – I'm fine with it. Feels more natural. A 4:3 screen looks like a square. I don't have square vision.

Then again, it's true that less than 800 pixels of vertical space feels somewhat cramped, and purely for web browsing / reading, 4:3 makes sense, and 3:4 would make even more sense. Personally I do much more and the widescreen is better all-around compromise. Two fingers + inertia makes scrolling pretty enjoyable.

¹) Quick enough on SSD'd machines, otherwise a bit slow. Luckily I rarely launch apps. I just keep tons of stuff running in different Spaces.

nitpick: the 15" MBP also has a 1680x1050 option, with a dpi of 129

I guess the MacBook Pro lineup will shift towards higher-DPI screens in the near future. The next-generation 15" MBP will probably have the 1680x1050 screen by default.

One thing he neglects to consider is the difference between a desktop and a laptop - the effective DPI of a screen is dependent on how far away it is from your eyes.

This is why 1920x1200 is a great resolution for a 17" laptop, but only comfortable on a larger desktop screen.

Does MacOS X really not automatically figure out the dpi of the screen and adjust font rendering? Ouch.

Do you know of any major OSes that actually have resolution indepdence? I've never heard of an OS auto-adjusting the DPI (Windows certainly doesn't, and Linux never has for me), nor have I seen any OS do so correctly even when you do it manually.

However, Apple has started efforts for OS frameworks to support resolution-independent apps that would be able to resized at will without losing proportion.

X.org has auto-calculated it for a while, if your monitor reports physical size via DDC. It's up to application-level stuff whether they do anything with the X server's DPI or not, but I believe both KDE and Gnome adjust their font rendering accordingly. Gnome has its own internal DPI, which you can set separately, but since about mid-2007 it defaults to the X server's auto-calculated DPI. Seems to work on my setup--- if I override my monitor's detected DPI via xorg.conf, the font sizes change.

The newer managed code UI libraries for Windows, WPF and Silverlight are built from the ground up to support resolution independence.

Further reading, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms748373.aspx#visual...

http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2005/11/250723.html

My Vaio has a 143dpi screen (1920x1080 on 15.4") and applications written to take heed of my DPI setting look great, other apps do not - in particular chrome and firefox which you need to use extensions to have it remember your custom zoom settings correctly. It can get quite frustrating.

It's not that simple. If the font size is adjusted, you probably want scalable UI as well (or it would break the harmony). I can see the benefits of that, but then again, if I bought a high-DPI & high-resolution screen, I want it to accommodate more stuff, which would not be the case if the stuff was scaled up.

The 13" MBA has the same resolution as my TV (hooked up to a Mac Mini).

Ouch.

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