Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pixel Perfect

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 142 posts

Re: Pixel Perfect

#71

Post by melling »

FrankBooth wrote: post #13
heretohelp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me just be straight up. I'm normally an Apple skeptic and I work primarily on Linux. That said, I don't think anybody else would've bothered to make retina display available to the general public until Apple forced their hand and made it available themselves...

That said, I don't think anybody else would've bothered to make retina display available to the general public until Apple forced their hand and made it available themselves... The technology was coming, it was just a matter of time. Apple are in the unique position of controlling both the hardware and the software, which makes it far easier for them release this in a nice way where the OS and much of the software wo…

Sure, it's always coming. Many of us were waiting for someone to make an "iPhone" for a decade. I used to explain to people at work that I shouldn't have to carry a Palm and a phone, for example. How long would we have had to wait if Apple didn't build it? Another 5 years? I'd like everything a half a decade sooner.

Apple gets ripped for not being innovative. What they really do is identify when good technology is ready for mass consumption then ship it. Remember when they went with USB? I was a PC user back then, building my own computers. I waited years before USB became widely adopted on affordable motherboards. Within 12-24 months I'd say Apple's entire product line will be Retina. Hopefully, there'll be enough buzz that it catches on with the Dell's and HP's.

Re: Pixel Perfect

#72

Post by bitcartel »

cageface wrote: post #10
arrrg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hate, dude? Can you point out anything that is actually wrong with the piece?

I could quote specific claims from the piece but it's just too annoying to enumerate all the breathless reasons he gives why this is yet another Apple product that makes everything that came before it trivial and irrelevant. I'm fed up with this kind of PR masquerading as tech journalism. He's not a journalist. He's part of Apple's third-party marketing arm and he gets compensated for writing this kind of trash with…

+1

How many of these blogger/journalists have broken real stories? Future of Mac Pro anybody? Sure, they like to name drop and whisper about 'informed sources' but the truth is they have nothing of substance to report. Everything is gossip, speculation, or parroting of press releases.

Re: Pixel Perfect

#73

Post by delackner »

cageface wrote: post #29
rimantas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even read what he writes, right?

I started reading him in the mid-2010's but his utter lack of objectivity lost him a place in my RSS aggregator long ago. If I want to read perceptive analysis of Apple products I prefer to read real, objective journalists like John Siracusa.

You are welcome to your opinion, but on your suggestion I just went and looked at John Siracusa's blog and for this entire year we have: 1: a discussion about various ways you can read his Mountain Lion Review. 2: How to cook pasta. 3: summer movies. 4: summary of 2011. That's it.

He writes also on Ars. In 2012, he has posted a single article, his review of Mountain Lion.

Might I ask, and I am being completely sincere, what DO you read regularly for "perceptive analysis of apple products" that goes beyond once a year OS reviews?

Re: Pixel Perfect

#74

Post by tsahyt »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #38

Unfortunately, a laptop is still a laptop. Small keyboard, inferior mouse (or lack thereof), single display, performance constrained by battery life. The performance margins are getting slimmer, but for a little over the price of the high end MacBook Pro (about $3000 with tax), I could build you a 64-core AMD G34 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, that would utterly destroy the Macbook performance-wise. Obviously, to each the…

You're probably right about a couple of things here. First of all, Apple's products are notoriously expensive. I've once got myself a list of hardware in the Mac Pro and looked up the individual prices of the components. It added up to roughly half of what Apple charges you. For that sort of money you have a huge margin of what you can do to make things quicker.

Also, laptops are not performance computers. The idea of a "high-end gamer laptop" makes me shiver and every time somebody asks me which laptop to buy for high-end gaming I'll tell them "a desktop". The thing is though, that a proper laptop is good enough for doing a lot of work-related tasks and definitely good enough for consumer use.

People like their laptops because they can carry them around, use them wherever they want. And they know that the price for this mobility is worse performance. Most people don't care though. It's quick enough for most things they do, so there's no reason to care either.

Personally I like my laptop, it's got a near-fullsize keyboard, a whopping 18.4" display and I don't care about a mouse at all, so the touchpad doesn't bother me. It's quick enough for everything I do, large enough to be comfortable to work on but still at a size that makes it somewhat portable.

Now obviously, if you've got performance computing to do, stay away from laptops. For everything else, they're just fine.

Re: Pixel Perfect

#75

Post by kilowatt »

I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it. But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?), but it's something you have to see and feel to judge the impact on your overall experience, IMO.

Lion inverted trackpad scrolling so that when you drag your two fingers down, the content follows them, like there is a physical connection between your hand and the page. On the Retina MBP, that illusion was mostly lost for me. I'm actually curious to know if owners of the Retina display get used to this chugginess, or if it's still kind of a big deal, even after awhile.

I know only a little bit about hardware composition in WebKit—and webpages are definitely not assembled "entirely" on the GPU. I suspect that there are gains to be made there, just in terms of how much work is being offloaded. Even if desktop Safari were to do what my old iPhone 3GS would do—separate the thread handling scrolling from the thread doing the painting, so that you could actually scroll ahead of where the renderer had filled in content, and see a checkerboard pattern—might be a better feeling alternative. Then again, this could already be happening. I haven't kept up with WebKit changes. Credit to Apple for pushing the boundaries. But I want my buttery smooth page renders, damnit.

/end entitled whining

Re: Pixel Perfect

#76

Post by printer »

jmduke wrote: post #30
jcampbell1 wrote: post #27

I find it quite surprising that the author is so passionate about typefaces, but serves his own blog in Verdana. Good thing it is not called JaringJireJall.net [1] That being said, I really think the days of sans fonts are close to over. 10 years from now, we will all be reading on 300 dpi screens and taste in typography will return to being the dominate feature of design. I can't wait until I can read the Economist…

I'm interested in this. As someone who doesn't pay that much attention to typography (beyond the obvious 'Papyrus is bad' stuff) what makes individual typefaces preferable over a standard typeface for all similarly structured content? (Besides branding, that is.)

Every font is designed for a purpose. Serif fonts are designed to help the brain recognize the different letters. Comic Sans was designed to be used informal. Helvetica was designed to be used in signage. Verdana was designed to be readable from (72dpi) computer screens. And so on.

So as screen resolutions increase a serif font can help the brain to recognize small letters increasing readability.

Re: Pixel Perfect

#77

Post by othermaciej »

kilowatt wrote: post #75

I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it. But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?), but it's something you have to see and feel…

As of Safari 6 on Mountain Lion, scrolling is threaded and nonblocking on Mac, but it doesn't yet work for all pages. So yes, you can scroll ahead of what is painted. The most common exception is pages with fixed positioning.

Re: Pixel Perfect

#78

Post by reitzensteinm »

lloeki wrote: post #45
reitzensteinm wrote: post #14

> Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-end desktop. It helps if that high end desktop hasn't been updated in two years . For CPU performance, laptops lagging a couple of years behind desktops is more or less business as usual.

Still, we're talking about a Xeon here, not your typical desktop-variant Core Something. It was a powerhouse.

The benchmarks were lightly threaded, for which Xeons basically offer no advantage - they let you have more cores in a machine, and that's about all. For rendering and encoding, the 12 core 2010 Mac Pros would still slaughter a retina MBP. No competition.

There are many impressive things about the retina MBP, but CPU performance is not one of them.

Re: Pixel Perfect

#79

Post by panacea »

reedlaw wrote: post #66
panacea wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Un-anti-aliased (aliased?) Verdana at a certain size (11 or 12 point? Can't recall) was the very best pixellated optimised font for the web when Gruber designed his blog. He hasn't redesigned since.

His blog is nearly unreadable on my non-retina display. I can only imagine how small the font looks on a Macbook Pro.

⌘+

Re: Pixel Perfect

#80

Post by czr80 »

kilowatt wrote: post #75

I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it. But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?), but it's something you have to see and feel…

Was it running Lion or ML? I recall some reviews mentioning that ML had specific optimisations to improve scrolling performance.
Post reply on HN