Application Scaling...

C

CreativeEye

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I have to say that this is one thing in Longhorn that is actually really really really good!.

As much as its designed to help older low res app's run on newer displays - I think theres a great market for application scaling for laptop users.

i.e. - I have my itunes window at a size that will show 40 songs in its window (as most of my smart playlists are limited to '40 tracks' because that amount averages about an afternoons worth of music) - that window takes up quite a bit of sceen space.

How great would it be to scale down the window so exactly the same info is shown but at a smaller scale.

Used alongside higher screen resolutions this could free up a huge amount of desktop real estate.

Is there anything like this for Macs?... if not - its one feature I wouldnt mind Apple stealing from Microsoft.
 
we've had it for years - exposé. the technology's there, it just needs a bit of coding to for it to make it into what you want, parb
 
Expose was in Panther... not years... more like many months.

But the possible XAML rendering engine - think Aqua/Quartz - alongside the Avalon presentation layer.
 
gerbick said:
Expose was in Panther... not years... more like many months.
Click to expand...

Panther was released in October 2003. And the developer builds were definitely available quite some time before then. Thus you are looking at 2 years or more with Expose.
 
my point was the technology has been available to mac users for a while now. the potential was there in 2001, alll they are doing is unlocking more of the potential of an effortless 2D graphics engine, something windows hasn't got, and is attampting to crowbar in (avalon). it sounds shoddy to me. windows is beset with the problems it has because they cut corners by adding stuff instead of spending the money to develop it properly (look at the huge problem registry and *.dll's have caused windows!). my view of longhorn at the moment, from what i've seen, is it's XP with a sidebar. it is a long way from revolutionary. and the dll's are still present along with their inherent registry, so adware, spyware, defragmenting and scattered installation files are going to be around for a long time in that world.

also the biggest advances, avalon (the windows interpretation of quartz? am i right?) and even the indexed file earch (spotlight, basically) are so delayed, they apparently won't make the release in 2006, and will be in a major service pack an 2007.... a joke.
 
even if the basic technologe has been there for apple users for a while it's microsoft who have found another great application of it in application scaling.

i agree that exposé would be the natural 'home' for such a feature as application scaling - i think it would be a great 'portables only' feature.
 
by the sounds of it though, the 2d rendering GUI layer in longhorn (avalon) won't be released with the public launch, it's just not ready. they say possbily 2007. so not for a while yet , then. same with WinFS, which is basically their spotlight. so what is in longhorn?
 
Exposé isn't the solution to this, really, because it uses bitmapped scaling, which, c'mon, just doesn't look very good. It's fine for what it does, but it's not suitable for full application use.

Tiger has this functionality, though, in a much better (although still incomplete) form. You can simply adjust the DPI of your programs. Then all your vector elements, like text, will be drawn with that DPI. So I can blow up (or shrink) my Safari window and have smooth text. It's still not finished, but if you have the developer tools installed, you can play around with it in the Quartz Debug app.

I don't know when it will be finished, but I'm guessing it will be before Longhorn. So...nyah. :p

Unfortunately, most Aqua interface elements are bitmapped, so scaling isn't quite as nice as it might be. Text looks great, though. I wonder if Apple will make Aqua more vector-based if/when they make this a "real" feature of OS X.
 

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interesting post Mikuro.

it seems like os x moving into a more vector based gui would be a good thing to do. maybe we'd see even more powerful applications of expose and window / desktop environment management?! expose is an amzing tool - something i first thought i wouldn't use much but now use all the time via hot corners in an intuative and 'real world use' way!...

was it sun that recently previewed some technology that let users 'flip' windows? to make notes on web pages etc... maybe thats totally off topic though!...

unfortunately i dont have developer tools! - i wouldnt even know where to begin to even get started on that - but i hope your guess ('...I don't know when it will be finished, but I'm guessing it will be before Longhorn...') is true!

even for simply being able to 'scale down' my chat contacts list window would be a god send!

powerful tools - simple (and real) applications, which become instantly ubiquitous. exactly like expose, spotlight, mail.app slideshows etc etc etc.
 
i remembered, while playing with the UI scaling thing in the quartz debugger, and the fact that all the GUI bits are bitmapped, that windows has always been vector-based - you've always been able to scale the gui in windows, right there in appearances...
 
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