Just a thought: what if this some kind of teaser for a new device Apple is preparing? Maybe some e-ink device? Ok, I know we are in 2022, but I would really love to see some “low-tech” device from them. I’ll try to wake up now :)
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Challenge: Pixel perfect design
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Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#72Just a thought: what if this some kind of teaser for a new device Apple is preparing? Maybe some e-ink device? Ok, I know we are in 2022, but I would really love to see some “low-tech” device from them. I’ll try to wake up now :)
I agree with your thought. "Challenges" like this rarely exists in a vacuum -- I bet there's something coming where this is relevant, and this is a chance for them to crowdsource design options.
BTW -- not implying there's malice here -- there is something genuinely fun about a design challenge like this, but I bet there's an ulterior motive too :)
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#73I feel that this a community feeler to test enthusiasm for technical ingredients of their possible AR future offering.
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#74I've been designing Apple icons since 1986, and clearly remember using ResEdit to "paint" icons, one pixel at a time.
These days, I always use Adobe Illustrator to create my digital assets in vector form, and always start with black-and-white, for logos and icons. That's fairly standard "branding" stuff. The icon needs to be recognizable, even when reduced to 16 X 16 (OK, I'll allow 32 X 32), and in monochrome. I seldom need to move to Photoshop, to apply any raster work.
Nowadays, Apple allows vector assets, so I usually include them as vector PDF. It slows down Xcode, but seems to make the apps look a lot better, and they are probably much smaller (App size has never been an issue for me, anyway).
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#75Aesprite is a great piece of kit for anyone doing the challenge (or doing pixel art in general) https://www.aseprite.org/ - you can get it via the steam store too for the big 3 platforms.
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#76I noticed the images looked a little blurred to me for pixel art. Digging further into it, they're oversized high resolution JPEG images scaled down by the browser rather then correctly sized PNGs. Putting quality aside and thinking about the poor internet pipes; each image is around 100kb in size and had it been a two bit black and white PNG would have been around 12kb. I know, I know, it's a probably an off the she…
They looked perfect to me, using an Macbook Air M1 and Chrome.
Take a screenshot and zoom in. If perfectly pixel aligned the edges should be sharp even when zoomed in on a screen shot. In the screenshot you will see slightly blurry edges.
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#77Is Apple preparing a new product that will have low-res black&white display?
My bet is keyboard with programmatic top key row (like Touch Bar)
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, my wife just wants a shuffle. No not some other thing that needs you to be connected to Spotify. Just music to run with.
Apple Watch kind of plays that part. https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/add-music-apd483798d11...
I have one but she has a Suunto. Can’t believe someone else hasn’t created a real competitor to the shuffle.
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#79This is a really good video about how Apple cares about being pixel perfect compared to Windows with something simple and obvious like the mouse cursor icon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg The improvements he made are also quite nice, Microsoft should take note...
Apple gives no shit about being pixel-perfect lately. Try using modern macOS on a non-retina display and your eyes will bleed because every single icon is drawn as if there's no pixel grid whatsoever. Everything is a blurry mess. Steve Jobs would've definitely fired someone over this, yet with Tim Cook it stays unfixed for more than 2 years — I'd guess because pixel-perfect icons don't affect the bottom line.
On some MacBooks, the default screen resolution is not a perfect 2x, but something like 1.75x. This means macOS is drawing its framebuffer in 2x, then scaling it down to 1.75x to fit the actual screen resolution which blurs things.
The new MacBook Pro for example uses perfect 2x scaling, but the MacBook Air has a smaller resolution screen and is not 2x.
Re: Challenge: Pixel perfect design
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what annoyed me the first time I saw vector icons used in Linux desktop environments. I appreciate the attempt at making something that scales to any size, but in practice you need to custom design the smallest versions of an icon. Even at the larger sizes, a vector won't always look great. If the renderer doesn't fudge vector edges to snap to pixel edges, you'll end up with blurry edges instead of clean, sha…
> Even at the larger sizes, a vector won't always look great. If the renderer doesn't fudge vector edges to snap to pixel edges, you'll end up with blurry edges instead of clean, sharp ones. Do you have an example? Text is essentially "vector" these days, and I've never heard of anyone complaining that text rendered on a modern screen has blurry edges. The blurriness of some text is often "cleartype" or whatever tric…
Fonts have hinting to align to pixels, which vector icons don’t.