Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd@lucs.lu.se wrote:
Lex Spoon wrote:
Man, after all this talk I'm really wishing I had such a UI available right now, even though I've got a plain ~100dpi monitor! I think I could live with 50% larger font sizes in return for such a convenient and scalable UI framework.
I think the reason why no one is doing this yet is that you need to get up to resolutions above 300 dpi or so before it won't look really ugly, today's pixels are far too discernible one by one. As an example, imagine what an every-other-pixel pattern at 72dpi will look like at 96 dpi. This is not the way you would specify things, of course, but the same effects would occurr often, where some distances yielding 1 pixel spaces at 72 would yield 2 at 96, etc., and that would look really bad. Going from 300 to 400 would not yield the same problem (4 vs. 5 pixels in the two cases).
I'm not sure where you'd have these pixel patterns. Most video cards can handle 16-bit color at least, and so it's not needed for dithering. And anti-aliasing usually only effects neighboring pixels, not large swaths.
To get an idea what such a system would be like on *your* monitor ("you" being anyone on the list), just look at a PDF file with anti-aliasing turned on. I find that things look fuzzy, but they are quite usable if you increase the font size by 50%.
I just realized that the dominating dpi size hasn't changed significantly since the bitmapped displays were invented. But it'll have to once everything is 32 bit color, or how else would you improve your product?
Maybe you're right. Still, I wonder if it's more a problem that there's no market as long as GUI's aren't resolution-scalable. It looks like a catch 22: nobody wants high-res video cards and monitors because they are useless for most GUI's. And yet, if the high-res video cards and monitors were available, the GUI's would surely improve within a few years (perhaps Microsoft would catch on in five or ten :)).
Interestingly, video cards for polygon-based games are out of this loop, because such games use scalable graphics already....
-Lex
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