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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Now that windows 8 and mountain lion both for the first time credibly handle HiDpi I agree, it's about time we switched.

I made that decision back in 2004 when my laptop had 1680x1050 resolution. Since then I've only gone higher and I've yet to have problems.

Windows seems to have handled this pretty well long, long ago so I have no idea what people are complaining about.

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You turn the ui scaling up to 150% in windows 7 or previous and don't experience visual and alignment issues? Or do you mean that you don't find the elements too small when used at default size? There is no argument that the latter works fine, obviously 1680x isn't even particularly higher density than 1386x. For most people, though, once you get to say 11" 1920x or 15" 2880x you really need the scaling and my experience is that it used to be pretty half baked.

Look at this skype screenshot at 125% for example:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5843/asus-zenbook-prime-ux21a-...

I've used DPI scaling in Windows 7 for years now, since I used Win7 as the OS on my HTPC. My television is the only large enough surface where with the higher resolution i've needed larger text.

That screenshot you link to is of Skype, and I would not use Skype as a standard example for anything. Even if MS owns it now, it is a poorly designed program by today's standards.

The only UI problems I ever had with scaling was with iTunes, and that was at >150%. I write it off as Apple not optimizing the UI for Windows.

> That screenshot you link to is of Skype, and I would not use Skype as a standard example for anything. Even if MS owns it now, it is a poorly designed program by today's standards.

How does this in any way negate it's worth as an example of a problem? It's effectively saying "That problem, it's an invalid problem because I said so."

Because the cause of the problem is Skype's (and iTunes) poor development, not Windows.

I didn't state the problem is invalid, I merely provided anecdotal evidence from my years of experience in using DPI scaling in Windows to demonstrate that it's a non-issue.

> Because the cause of the problem is Skype's (and iTunes) poor development, not Windows.

Which is the key factor here. It's not Windows' fault specifically, but it's a problem that occurs when using (very common software on) Windows. To the end user, what's the difference?

If the problem is with third-party software, then end users have a decent chance of finding acceptable alternative software without the problem. The problem is also likely to be limited to some specific applications they use, rather than coming up generally.

If the problem is with Windows, finding acceptable alternative software is unlikely, if it is possible at all. Even worse, users are likely to see the problem affecting most of the applications they use rather than just some specific applications.

I'd say end users would notice and care about the difference between those two scenarios.

If the commonly-available applications for an OS are ugly, that OS is going to be perceived as ugly. And vice versa.

If Skype and iTunes -- which together are probably installed (one or the other) on a huge percentage of home systems, and a nontrivial number of corporate ones -- are ugly at higher resolutions, then there's a serious problem.

Sure, they shouldn't write shitty software, but it's now Microsoft's problem due to how it impacts the platform as a whole. At least in the case of Skype, one assumes they could fix it (since they now own the product); iTunes is ... probably more complicated.

I'm not saying there isn't a problem. I'm just saying the problem can be perceived differently even by people who don't understand what's going on under-the-covers.

If people generally spend most of their time in IE/Chrome/Firefox,Word,Excel,PowerPoint... and they all look great and Skype and iTunes look bad, I'd expect people to complain about Skype and iTunes.

If, on the other hand, people spend a lot of their time in applications that look bad I'd expect them to have a broader complaint (which may or may not be about Windows since, by assumption, we are talking about people who don't understand what's going on under-the-covers).

I think you're all missing a key part of the equation here. It was the OEM who configured the OS, the OEM who selected the panel, and the OEM who advertised the feature that presumably went into my buying decision. If my (windows+skype) looks bad and my friend's otherwise identical (windows+skype) laptop from another brand looks fine, I'm blaming the vendor. Who, coincidently enough, is the party that takes the economic hit if I return it. OEM's know this deep in their core - and this is one of the significant reasons you haven't seen them pushing devices that require scaling for normal eyesight.

> I'd say end users would notice and care about the difference between those two scenarios.

You haven't met very many end users, have you?

It's an issue if I need to use Skype. :(

The problem is that both the OS and popular apps need to support it, otherwise in most people's eyes it will seem like Windows is "broken".

Windows XP at 2560x1600 is ok on my 30" monitor, but it would be next to unusable on a 15" display. The Icons didn't scale to the resolution, so they would have been tiny.

Lots of screen real estate though.

2560x1440 on my 27" iMac is ok, but I have to use CMD-+ on almost all web pages. Only in Safari is Magic Touchpad zooming smooth and iOS like, but I'd like to use Chrome.

With 175% zoom I get some weird(and reported) errors in Chrome: http://imgur.com/TCDMj

The HiDPI solution in ML is not really a solution for resolutions that are somewhere in-between normal DPI and HiDPI.

If your eyesight isn't good enough to handle low-DPI, you may want to investigate the accessibility control panel.

There's nothing there to force a minimum font size.

Because that would break every app. But you can zoom the whole screen.

Yes, and that is exactly the problem. The iMac's size and resolution is awkward-DPI.

I enabled HiDPI mode, but then I got 1280x720 on 27"... And without it much of the texts on web pages are too small.

You make it sound like I'm blind or something. I'm just tired of reading far too small texts.

I'm pretty sure HiDPI mode and accessibility zooming are not the same thing.

100 DPI is pretty much the industry standard, so if it feels awkward to you then it's not a problem with the iMac per se.

The size of the display makes you increase the distance, or one would get chronic neck pain quite fast. :)

Are you running Windows XP under BootCamp? I could see Windows XP being okay at 27" @2560x1440.

No, Mountain Lion. I am a bit disappointed since NeXT had Display Postscript back in the 80s and today we use bitmap icons far too much.

NeXT had bitmap icons (TIFFs) displayed using display postscript. The problem with vector graphics in icons is that you'll still need multiple versions for different resolutions or the icons will look terrible at most resolutions, and then it's horribly inefficient to render them on-the-fly all the time so you'll end up caching them in memory and rescaling them... and -- oh look -- bitmaps.

Well, eventually it's going to come out as a bitmap—they'll still end up as pixels on the screen. Vector icons just give you the flexibility to do it really really well. Cache them, prerender them, I don't care what works best, just match the icon DPI to the screen DPI and we're good.

His point is that it's not good enough to simply match the DPIs and render. Small icons need actual visual differences, not just scaling, in order to really look good. Some icons completely change their character at small sizes, because what looks good when small is not the same as what looks good when large, regardless of DPI. So going pure-vector doesn't completely solve the problem, although it certainly can make it easier.

There is that, and there is also the quality of how aliasing is handled by real time vector art renderers. We just aren't their yet to be relying on vector art for icons (even though they start out that way in Illustrator).

That's true at low-DPI, but not so much at high-DPI. I wonder if a bundle of low-DPI bitmap + a vector for high-DPI would work better than the standard practice of bundling multiple bitmaps...

I think it's still true, although less so. Certainly a certain amount of fiddling takes place in an attempt to align to pixels etc., but sometimes icons just need to change at different physical sizes. Small elements may need to be enlarged to remain visible and such.

But by chosing a certain style to all UI elements, vector icons could look and feel just smashing anyway.

Quartz2d is effectively "Display PDF". Bitmap icons are necessary (at least in the icon portfolio) as they can degrade more gracefully at lower pixel counts.

NeXTStep/OpenStep used bitmap icons.

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