Oh man. Hotline. Fond memories. Thanks for sharing!
Infinite Mac
211–220 of 340 posts
Re: Infinite Mac
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…
Text fuzziness has had nothing to do with your monitor ever since we've gone digital with HDMI and DVI
Linux & Windows generally use implementations of antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract away the details for you
Re: Infinite Mac
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
For fuzz, anti and anti-aliasing issues, you can sometimes make them worse with a HiDPI display. All of these issues really boil down to render resolution not integer scaling to the display resolution. If the render resolution is an integer multiple of the display resolution or vice versa, you will generally always get beautiful crisp rendering - this is exactly the approach Apple adopted, and is why they had to use…
Yes, it’s a shame that there are only two 5K 27” displays to choose from, and both are expensive. The industry has dropped the ball on this for years, all those 32” 4K screens may be cheap but they’re no use to me…
On Linux
Step one plug in 4K 27" monitor.
Step two set scaling factor for gtk/java apps to 2. KDE/QT apps can figure out the correct DPI without hassle.
Step three set fonts smaller or larger if desired.
On Windows plug in 4K 27" monitor. Text doesn't look in my opinion quite as nice as Linux but it isn't fuzzy, small, or giant. Possibly font rendering could look nicer if I bothered to tweak it but since its basically boot to steam I see little reason to bother.
I keep hearing this argument that 4K somehow doesn't work or looks shitty and only 5K Mac displays provide an acceptable high dpi experience and I feel like I'm getting transmissions from an alternate universe where nobody had to scale UIs from screens that varied in DPI by a factor of 3 for almost 20 years. Long before 4K screens.
Re: Infinite Mac
#214Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.
Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a means to a different end. However, today, I definitely see my macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an end, the way people saw old PCs.
Re: Infinite Mac
#215I was hoping to find Enchanted Scepters in there (I'd guess it would be in the system7 version), but no luck. I tried a few years ago to get it working on a Mac emulator but I wasn't successful, and I have fond memories of that game.
https://archive.org/details/EnchantedSceptersMacintosh
What!?!? No way - thank you so much!
Re: Infinite Mac
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car. It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around. Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulat…
Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there, and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.
Any stories / surprising bits from working there?
Re: Infinite Mac
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…
I've recently gotten a MacBook Pro 14 for work, and tried out Ubuntu 22.04 RC on a laptop, and I was confounded with how fuzzy both of them look today (Ubuntu with fractional scaling, but Mac even with 2x scaling on 4k screen).
Whatever setup was there on Ubuntu 20.04 which made text render clearly needs to come back (I used to use slight hinting setting, but it seems subpixel rendering is going away on Linux too). Please!
Re: Infinite Mac
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…
Text fuzziness has had nothing to do with your monitor ever since we've gone digital with HDMI and DVI Linux & Windows generally use implementations of antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract away the details for you
It can still happen when different display panel pixel colour arrangements don't match subpixel rendering settings in software, though that'll usually happen with non-monitor displays like TVs.
Re: Infinite Mac
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Menus are supposed to have 7 +/- 2 items. Inside Macintosh Volume 1, if memory serves.
Yes. This matches to what was thought (at the time? I'm not sure if research has changed the thinking on this) to be the size of human working memory. 7 ± 2 was believed to be about how much a human could understand with zero layers of abstraction, i.e. "in parallel" (you can imagine your brain has 7 ± 2 registers, though that's a highly inaccurate model). Any larger, and your brain has to build abstractions to refer…
As opposed to "nested two levels deep under one item or another on the File…or was it View…or maybe Window…menu? No? Okay, then try holding down Option…"
I still think that searchable menus was one of the killer features of OS X vs. anything else at the time, and it's frankly amazing that the majority of Windows apps still don't have menu search.
Re: Infinite Mac
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Text fuzziness has had nothing to do with your monitor ever since we've gone digital with HDMI and DVI Linux & Windows generally use implementations of antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract away the details for you
It can still happen when different display panel pixel colour arrangements don't match subpixel rendering settings in software, though that'll usually happen with non-monitor displays like TVs.
True, though in practice I haven't noticed it to be nearly as obnoxious as Apple stuff trying to upscale at non-integer intervals