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Ever
since the release of Mac OS X, there has been a weird,
tacit push by Apple -- a stealth paradigm shift --
that feels like it's one of those things that we'll
look back at in ten years and hail as either one of
the most significant steps in computer design in history,
or one of the biggest and most misguided failures.
Only time will tell which.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the death
of the concept of "pixel-perfect."
By "pixel-perfect", I mean the idea that a picture
or icon should have a single, authoritative size,
with specific pixels at precisely defined places in
the image, like the example at left. Icon design has
traditionally relied very heavily on this concept,
especially in the early days when color palettes were
limited; an icon designer who could produce pixel-perfect
icon art that gave a clear and accurate idea of what
the icon represented was at the top of his game.
Similarly, full-size images always had definite pixel
sizes. This here image is 647x892 pixels, and that's
the size it should display, dagnabbit. Sure, you can
scale it to half-size or quarter-size or one-third-size,
but scaling algorithms being as CPU-intensive as they
are, the output is generally blocky and ugly.
But Mac OS X is tacitly changing all that. The first
step was Quartz and its built-in smooth scaling algorithm.
This enabled features like the Dock to have real-time
scaling of its icons to any arbitrary size as you
move your mouse over them, and for icons to be arbitrarily
sized in folder windows. You choose the size of your
icons by a slider in the View Options pane, but while
there are little tick marks to show you various divisions
along the slider's length, there are no detentes or
"notches," or places where the slider will
naturally fall or magnetize. Usually you'd assume
that a slider moved to the vicinity of the halfway
marker should snap exactly to that marker (as with
the Balance setting in audio controls), but that doesn't
happen in Mac OS X. Why?
It's
because Mac OS X doesn't want to perpetuate the idea
of display sizes that are bound to the pixel size
of an image. Instead, it wants you to pick a size
you like, whatever size that might be, and it will
conform everything to fit that size as though it were
the "authoritative" size. No more having to worry
about where each individual pixel goes: with Quartz,
in which anti-aliasing is at its historical best,
sub-pixel rendering is not only possible like never
before, but it is a crucial underlying foundation
to how interface elements should behave. Text smoothing
now permeates the OS, and tiny labels in icons (as
at right) can be shown at much smaller sizes than
before, regardless of the actual display resolution.
(It should be noted that at multiples of "authoritative"
sizes, like 100% or 50%, or in icons where a clear
32x32 or 16x16 icon has been set with the lines sharpened
so as to avoid excessive blurriness as you continuously
scale down, there is a perceptible clarifying of the
image. Just barely. Stray one percentage's worth from
the authoritative size and the smooth scaling kicks
in, and the clarity is lost.)
Whoa, now. Hold on here. This all sounds very good
in theory-- and no doubt it all sounded great in Apple
boardrooms circa 1998-- but how does it work in practice?
What kind of resistance is this going to hit?
Well, first of all, people expect their full-size
images (photos, Web graphics, random stuff exchanged
between friends) to be of a certain pixel size, and
they expect them to open and display at that size
or be damned. And it's all well and good to have application
icons that shrink smoothly down to any size-- not
just 16x16 or 32x32, but whatever size you might want--
but we've built up some expectations over the years.
We like the feeling of there being a "prescribed"
size for displaying things. We like the psychological
reassurance of the tactile feedback in sliders with
"notches" at likely spots like halfway and one-quarter
and 200%. We don't take kindly to a slider that lets
us select 51% or 23% without assuming we mean the
"obvious" nearby choice. How are we going to overcome
this? And should we?
Well, let's look at a couple more things Apple has
done with Mac OS X since its release, which help to
further the death of "pixel-perfect".
First of all, the built-in Preview application. In
10.1, it stopped displaying images at the pixel-perfect
100% size by default if there was an embedded DPI
setting in the image. This meant, since the screen
resolution on Macs is 72 DPI and most images have
an embedded DPI of 300 or 150, the images would show
up shrunk down to 1/3 or less of their expected size.
Needless to say, this has caught many users off guard--
myself not least. (And Apple will definitely need
to address the counterintuitiveness of this feature
in the next release-- have a preference so the user
can elect to always open images at the pixel-perfect
size, and/or a quick keyboard shortcut to zoom to
that size.) So the authoritative size of the picture
as displayed on-screen has now been superseded by
the embedded print DPI setting, in the interest of
displaying the picture on-screen at the same size
that it would print out on paper. Which means that,
say, 10 years from now, when we have 300 DPI monitors,
we'll be able to see the pictures on-screen in all
the detail they would have on paper, and at
the same size. But in the interim, those "lost" pixels
that you don't get to see at 72 DPI... well, they're
just extra information. You can see it if you zoom
in. Just like everything will be in the future: full
of extra information that you'll only be able to see
if you zoom in... or if the hardware can handle
it. Just imagine: One day you'll have two displays
side by side in the same workspace; one a traditional
72-DPI display, and the other a 300-DPI monitor. You
can grab an image in the low-res screen and drag it
to the high-res screen, and the size of the picture
won't change-- but the details and clarity will. It
will become as clear as the printed page; all the
depth the display can handle will be revealed. It'll
be like moving it under a different lens at the optometrist's:
"Camera 1... Camera 2." (Ten years ago you could have
made the same argument with a monochrome screen and
a color screen side by side.) Move the picture back
onto the low-res screen, and the details will simply
blur again, rather than the picture blowing up to
accommodate the pixel-level details that can't be
shown at the resolution of the low-res screen. Just
because a screen's display resolution doesn't match
the embedded DPI settings in a picture doesn't mean
the picture's displayed size should be altered to
fit the pixels. If you want all the pixels to show
at 72 DPI, then set the image's embedded resolution
to 72 DPI.
And the second big milestone in this effort is iPhoto.
Open up the Preferences and set the double-click action
to open the picture in a separate window. Now double-click
on a picture. Note that it doesn't show up at 100%
pixel-perfect size... but oddly enough, it doesn't
look any the worse for wear. Grab the lower-right
corner and drag it-- and the picture scales in real-time,
with no perceptible loss in quality. Even if you scale
it up! Scale-up artifacts only start to appear around
150% or so. Similarly, if you take photos at super-high-res
on your 3.2 megapixel camera, and then publish them
to the Web, it scales them to a comfortable display
size, rather than keeping them at full pixel-perfect
size. And the scaling options in the other Sharing
features are geared to inches, not pixels. So the
message here is that the number of pixels in an image
is not important. What's important is how it looks...
just like icons in the Finder, you should be able
to scale a picture to whatever size you feel like,
and it should not punish you for that by applying
a crappy chunky scaling algorithm.
Now that we've arrived at (a) the software support
in Quartz for this level of anti-aliasing and smooth
real-time scaling, and (b) the hardware sophistication
to support it, we are ready to ditch "pixel-perfect"
image display, at long last. Not that anybody has
really seen this coming, though. Did we really want
this to happen?
Well,
like I said, this is likely enough to be one of those
things that seems horrendously obvious in retrospect.
Video games have been undergoing this paradigm shift
for years now-- instead of pixel-perfect 2D sprites
like the ones at left, we now have polygon-mapped
characters in 3D space who never appear as the same
pixel map twice, depending on their position, distance
from the camera, posture, and so on. Games have long
ago abandoned the need for anything pixel-perfect.
So why not have computers follow suit?
Our expectations will weigh us down as these changes
overtake us. We'll still gravitate towards pixel-perfect
display sizes for as long as they're available. But
sooner or later, display hardware will experience
a quantum leap in technological complexity, and we'll
have a need to store pictures with much more detail
and resolution than we've ever had before. Pixels
will become so small as to be irrelevant in and of
themselves. What will matter will be how the image
appears on the display device you happen to be using--
monitor, paper, digital-ink, whatever. And we won't
get there if we stick to the idea that pixel dimensions
have any meaning in the long run.
Apple has bit off a big task here: one of the most
fundamental shifts in computing paradigms we've ever
faced. Probably the reason we've heard no fanfare
about it (other than the stock Quartz rah-rah'ing)
is that it's really hard to pitch this shift as a
"feature", or get people to understand its utility
in a quick PR bite. The only way to get people used
to it is through a long, slow, immersion training
process, like in a hot tub. And at least the trend
here is toward encouraging people to use their computers
in a Mac-like way: to treat your applications as applications,
not icons; to treat your pictures as pictures,
not collections of pixels. It's all about the final
product, not about the trivial computer details that
we should never ourselves have to deal with.
It should also be pointed out here that even though
LCD monitors are all the rage, the Mac OS X push toward
freedom from pixel-perfectness is occurring in
spite of them, rather than because of them. LCDs
are horrible for this new paradigm. They display individual
pixels much more sharply than CRTs do; we can see
the little lines between pixels, we can pick out individual
dead pixels on our screens-- on LCDs, you'd think,
it's more important than ever to be pixel-perfect.
And you'd be right. CRTs by their very nature are
much more flexible and arbitrarily scalable than LCDs
are. You can switch resolutions to whatever you want
in a CRT with no loss of clarity; on an LCD, you're
stuck with one built-in resolution, unless you want
to force it to do messy interpolation and anti-aliasing
to emulate a different resolution (which, itself,
is another technique which owes its existence to the
modern power of anti-aliasing and smoothing technology).
If we had started with LCDs and were now moving toward
CRTs, the push to kill pixel-perfect images would
make a lot more sense. But Steve Jobs is barreling
ahead anyway, with visions of cheap 300 DPI LCD screens
dancing in his head. Who knows when they'll reach
this backwater planet? IBM has one already, but it's
$8000 and powered by a video card that makes nVidia's
latest offerings look like 16-color EGA adapters.
So it's coming, but it'll be a while.
But
to get used to the idea, fire up iPhoto and pop open
a few pictures; you'll start to get an idea of just
where this is all going.
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The last app I needed to convert entirely to OS X delivers in upgrades and
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Strata
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Stargazer's
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to the big commercial astronomy software packages? Neale may have found one.
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program for the Mac.
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encyclopaedia and space flight simulator all rolled into one - could The Digital
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version of After Effects and likes what he sees.
InDesign
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part of our review of Adobe InDesign 2.0 for Mac OS X, Pierre Igot looks at
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plenty to like.
Corel
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it's brought some powerful friends that makes this Suite worth the look...
OmniGraffle
2.0 (5-10-02) András Puiz. Analog napkins are so 20th century --
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Puiz wishes all Mac developers developed a similar understanding of Aqua,
and of Mac OS X in general.
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it's called Watson.
Ever
since the release of Mac OS X, there has been a weird,
tacit push by Apple -- a stealth paradigm shift --
that feels like it's one of those things that we'll
look back at in ten years and hail as either one of
the most significant steps in computer design in history,
or one of the biggest and most misguided failures.
Only time will tell which. 
It's
because Mac OS X doesn't want to perpetuate the idea
of display sizes that are bound to the pixel size
of an image. Instead, it wants you to pick a size
you like, whatever size that might be, and it will
conform everything to fit that size as though it were
the "authoritative" size. No more having to worry
about where each individual pixel goes: with Quartz,
in which anti-aliasing is at its historical best,
sub-pixel rendering is not only possible like never
before, but it is a crucial underlying foundation
to how interface elements should behave. Text smoothing
now permeates the OS, and tiny labels in icons (as
at right) can be shown at much smaller sizes than
before, regardless of the actual display resolution.
Well,
like I said, this is likely enough to be one of those
things that seems horrendously obvious in retrospect.
Video games have been undergoing this paradigm shift
for years now-- instead of pixel-perfect 2D sprites
like the ones at left, we now have polygon-mapped
characters in 3D space who never appear as the same
pixel map twice, depending on their position, distance
from the camera, posture, and so on. Games have long
ago abandoned the need for anything pixel-perfect.
So why not have computers follow suit? 
But
to get used to the idea, fire up iPhoto and pop open
a few pictures; you'll start to get an idea of just
where this is all going.
