Re: Mac Market Share: Reading those numbers

In article <091ju3lapf3mvlfkp3v5f606mjmuncmnug@xxxxxxx>,
Mayor of R'lyeh <mayor.of.rlyeh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

What I'm actually saying, of course, is that there are tradeoffs that
must be made when rendering fonts on low-resolution devices,

Your average computer screen is not a low resolution device. There may
be higher resolutions screens around but that doesn't make computer
monitors low resolution.

By the standards of text reproduction, ~100 ppi is extremely low
resolution. With the exception of the handful of fonts specifically
designed for on-screen display, essentially all fonts have significant
elements that can't be rendered accurately at typical text sizes while
fitting everything to the pixel grid at that resolution.

This necessarily forces a trade-off between letterform accuracy and
sharpness. Let's say you're rendering on-screen text, and the vertical
line in a lowercase 'l' in a given font would, scaled to the desired
size, be 1.3 pixels wide. Well, you can't draw something .3 pixels wide
on-screen. You have two choices.

You can round it to one pixel wide, which is going to make it look
thinner, and cause its center line to not fall at exactly the right
distance from the previous character.

Alternatively, you can render a one-pixel 100% black line, and then
render a one pixel ~30% gray line next to it. Because of the way the
brain interpolates detail, this will look like a 1.3 pixel line,
preserving the weight of the stroke as well as possible. However, it
will look like a slightly fuzzy 1.3 pixel line.

Actual implementations are complicated by sub-pixel anti-aliasing and
other factors, but basically, Microsoft chooses to do the the former,
while Apple chooses to do the latter. In terms of text density (the
average "color" of blocks of text) and character shape accuracy, Apple's
approach produces something more like what you'd see in print, and more
like what the font designer intended. If you don't care at all about
typography and just want fonts that are as easy as possible to read
on-screen, Microsoft's approach is probably better.

[snip]

Um, what exactly are you going on about? Where did I say graphic design
isn't a specialized market? How is this related to what we were
discussing above?

You routinely dismiss advantages for Windows because the market is a
specialty but here you are saying that Apple's way is better because
its geared towards a specialty.

I'm saying Apple's way is better *for Apple* because it's better for
some of Apple's core customers. (And, I'd argue even Mac users who
aren't design professionals are probably more likely than average to
care about typography. Caring about design sort of goes with being a Mac
user. It's why many users pick the platform.)

[snip]

Leopard's Unified window look developed incrementally as a result of
trends that have been ongoing as new versions of OS X have been
released.

Of course. Its not like KDE is put out by Xerox or anything. 8)

And I'm looking at some KDE screenshots and not particularly
seeing much similarity.

You're probably looking at KDE 4. They made a radical change in its
appearance for 4.0. Take a look at some KDE 2 or 3 screenshots. The
similarity is undeniable.

Like this?
http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/kde3/screenshots.php?img=kde-3-konq-web
site.jpg

Try:
http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/medium/klyx1.jpg

Um... that looks much more like an older version of Windows than like
anything else. It certainly doesn't look like Safari. Window corners
aren't rounded, the background is a solid gray rather than a gradient,
the button style is totally different (much more blocky), window titles
are presented very differently, and the "light" creating highlights and
shadows on UI elements is from the upper left, rather than the top.

[snip]

--
"More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming
out any other way."
--George W. Bush in Martinsburg, W. Va., July 4, 2007
.