Quote: Original post by Promit
I hate their font rendering, too. Windows, I have the option of ClearType (which works very well in Vista, not always so well in XP), or basic smoothed text. Both are crisp and beautiful, especially ClearType when it's working. OSX has, as far as I can tell, just one setting: blurry goddamn mess. They make their otherwise incredible 30 inch studio monitors just terrible to use with that damn font engine.

Maybe font rendering is a personal preference, because I prefer my Mac's font rendering to that in Windows XP. Of course it's hard for me to do a full comparison, because the fonts I typically use on the Mac are better, and even with similar fonts my PC is running on an old 1024x768 res monitor. And I don't have Vista to compare. I also typically use larger fonts, although you can turn off the font smoothing below a certain size on a Mac.

the difference is of course that windows, linux, and almost any other os except OSX lets you configure font rendering. Ditto for other issues. If you like the way OSX does something, good for you, but can you make an argument that it is best for everyone and therefore must be hard-coded?

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
the difference is of course that windows, linux, and almost any other os except OSX lets you configure font rendering. Ditto for other issues.

<nitpick>You can configure the font smoothing - switching it from light to normal to strong, and allowing for rendering under yay pixels to be turned off completely. You just can't "configure" it to completely off</nitpick>

I do get the point, though. [smile] It would be nice for a few more configuration options. The mouse acceleration one is odd that it's not present. Even though it doesn't bug me it would good to have the option.

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
the difference is of course that windows, linux, and almost any other os except OSX lets you configure font rendering. Ditto for other issues.

<nitpick>You can configure the font smoothing - switching it from light to normal to strong, and allowing for rendering under yay pixels to be turned off completely. You just can't "configure" it to completely off</nitpick>

On OSX? You cant enable font hinting or anything like that (font hinting = transforming the font slightly so that it looks good when rendered to pixel grid). Look at text closely, same letter has different darkness on each rendering (presumably because they don't even do anti-aliasing correctly, i.e. no gamma correction).
Of course you can get used to that, but meh, I have some quality expectations.

Quote:

I do get the point, though. [smile] It would be nice for a few more configuration options. The mouse acceleration one is odd that it's not present. Even though it doesn't bug me it would good to have the option.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
On OSX? You cant enable font hinting or anything like that (font hinting = transforming the font slightly so that it looks good when rendered to pixel grid). Look at text closely, same letter has different darkness on each rendering (presumably because they don't even do anti-aliasing correctly, i.e. no gamma correction).
Of course you can get used to that, but meh, I have some quality expectations.

I know, but <nitpick>it does at least have some font rendering configuration.</nitpick>. Just not many. [grin]

To be honest, I'm not that fussed about each letter looking good when I "look close". I'm more concerned that the letters look nice at the arm-and-a-half distance that my monitor is at. The font smoothing helps with that.

But again, it might just be that I don't like very small text to begin with. I know a lot of programmers prefer very small fonts to cram as much info as they can get onto the screen. In which case crisp pixel boundaries are required, and font smoothing is going to make everything look like ink smudges. Whereas I prefer my fonts to be 12px or larger, so it's less of an issue.

Although... now that you've made me look really close at my fonts, they're all looking blurry now. Curse you! Now I'm stuck between looking at the blurring on my standard text or turning it down to an even more unreadable lighter unsmoothed form for 12px or below. [sad]

I post here a lot less these days, but here's what I think.

• The dock is nice and shiny at first, but then you realise it's taking too much space at its default size. Also the default icon zoom effect gets annoying too. Turn that off for starters.


• The Dashboard - not too sure about that. Being able to show and hide it at will is better than Vista's sidebar which is either enabled and there all the time (unless I've missed something) or disabled and not usable or visible at all. That said, having to interrupt what you're doing to use any of the widgets is annoying and a lot of the widgets aren't massively useful IMO. The weather? Look it up online or look out of the window


• Window management - urgh. What's wrong with a standard maximise button like every other OS and window manager? Why does it not do what you'd expect? It's an adventure every time I click the green + button because I have absolutely no idea or prediction about what exactly it's going to do this time


• I noticed something else too, don't know if it's on older versions of MacOS or just Mac OSX. When you have Caps Lock on, pushing shift doesn't temporarily lowercase what you're typing like it does on Windows and Linux. If you've got a mixed case password which is predominantly upper case, you'd likely want the caps lock on and hit the shift for the lower case bits. On Mac, you have to either hold down shift for each of the upper case letters and let go for the lower case ones, or stop what you're doing, disable the caps lock, type the lower case character and switch caps lock back on. Sure, it's not the end of the world but it's a definite, noticeable niggle for me


• Not just OSX, but all versions of MacOS: why do I close a program window but the program keeps running? And why do we have an all-purpose menu bar across the top of the screen which controls everything to do with each individual running app and changes depending on which one's in focus? Annoying.

I was thinking about giving iPhone development a go, but I've also used XCode and didn't take to it. I actually know someone who's doing iPod Touch development and to be honest the whole process looks and sounds like some kind of circus performance. He had to get one of his colleagues to act as a certificate authority, apparently? I don't know the full story but it sounded horribly convoluted and long winded and I distinctly remember it putting me off at the time.

I personally find OSX to be very shiny and cutesy, but mindbogglingly irritating in many respects as well. There was a period when I thought about buying a Mac, but then it occurred to me that I use Visual Studio an awful lot and play games via Steam. No point in spending a vast amount of money on a Mac if I'm going to spend half of my time running Windows in a VM and having to cope with that keyboard, and that mouse.

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
To be honest, I'm not that fussed about each letter looking good when I "look close". I'm more concerned that the letters look nice at the arm-and-a-half distance that my monitor is at. The font smoothing helps with that.

My understanding is that font rendering on the Mac goes back to the days when the Mac was used heavily in desktop publishing. You wanted the "weight" of the text (that is, the apparent "darkness" of the entire block) to approximate what it would be on a printed page. So the Mac sacrifices the look of text on the monitor so that it better matches the look on a printed page.

In my experience, a lot of the "problems" with the Mac are more like "differences" than actual problems. For example, I'm sure you'd find Window's mouse acceleration strange if you'd been using a Mac for all this time.

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
Window management - urgh. What's wrong with a standard maximise button like every other OS and window manager? Why does it not do what you'd expect? It's an adventure every time I click the green + button because I have absolutely no idea or prediction about what exactly it's going to do this time

Oooh, that reminds me of something that still bugs me about Mac OS X - you can only resize windows via the bottom-right corner. If that little corner is hard to get at, well you've just got to try something else. That continues to bug the hell out of me.

I also agree with you on the Dock. I find the icon zooming to be as annoying as hell too. I used to have it fixed and hidden along the bottom. This week I'm trying something new, and having it visible and fixed on the right of the screen. I've got a couple of dozen things in my Dock so everything is really tiny, but it's got some perks to having all my commonly used apps over there.

P.S. Lordy I'm replying a lot to the topic. Am I Mac zealot, or am I merely bored and stuck in the Lounge? You decide!

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
On OSX? You cant enable font hinting or anything like that (font hinting = transforming the font slightly so that it looks good when rendered to pixel grid). Look at text closely, same letter has different darkness on each rendering (presumably because they don't even do anti-aliasing correctly, i.e. no gamma correction).
Of course you can get used to that, but meh, I have some quality expectations.

I know, but <nitpick>it does at least have some font rendering configuration.</nitpick>. Just not many. [grin]

To be honest, I'm not that fussed about each letter looking good when I "look close". I'm more concerned that the letters look nice at the arm-and-a-half distance that my monitor is at. The font smoothing helps with that.

But again, it might just be that I don't like very small text to begin with. I know a lot of programmers prefer very small fonts to cram as much info as they can get onto the screen. In which case crisp pixel boundaries are required, and font smoothing is going to make everything look like ink smudges. Whereas I prefer my fonts to be 12px or larger, so it's less of an issue.

Although... now that you've made me look really close at my fonts, they're all looking blurry now. Curse you! Now I'm stuck between looking at the blurring on my standard text or turning it down to an even more unreadable lighter unsmoothed form for 12px or below. [sad]

my monitor is also at about arm and half distance (with font size 11 in IDE), but I can see if it is blurry or not. What I don't like is this effect when two f in 'effect' antialias differently. Like inkjet on toiletpaper. I notice that just fine from 1.5 meter distance.

Quote: Original post by Codeka

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
To be honest, I'm not that fussed about each letter looking good when I "look close". I'm more concerned that the letters look nice at the arm-and-a-half distance that my monitor is at. The font smoothing helps with that.

My understanding is that font rendering on the Mac goes back to the days when the Mac was used heavily in desktop publishing. You wanted the "weight" of the text (that is, the apparent "darkness" of the entire block) to approximate what it would be on a printed page. So the Mac sacrifices the look of text on the monitor so that it better matches the look on a printed page.

Not really.
If that was the original reason, then text editor would simply render without hinting, while user interface would render with hinting.

I do agree that it is closer to print... if you're publishing with inkjet on toiletpaper.
Or maybe if you're publishing with really old(and crappy) printer back from the days when macs were used heavily for publishing.

Quote:
In my experience, a lot of the "problems" with the Mac are more like "differences" than actual problems. For example, I'm sure you'd find Window's mouse acceleration strange if you'd been using a Mac for all this time.

as I said, the difference is of course that windows, linux, and almost any other os except OSX lets you configure font rendering. Ditto for other issues.
Only on OSX would you have to use font rendering "optimized for publishing" when you're not a publisher, or mouse curve that you don't like, or other annoyances of that sort.