Resolution Independance in OSX Leopard!?

Jobs flaunted the new OSX “Leopard” this week with a slew of new features. Unfortunately, one of them wasn’t the dropping of the silly cat names that makes it impossible to remember which version came after which. But there were some interesting features none-the-less. Time Machine looks great–a long needed push to get more of us (myself included) on a more routine backup schedule. Universal Access improvements look impressive. And the update to the 64-bit architecture is great.

One feature that didn’t make it into Jobs’ presentation, however, was the fact that it appears that Leopard will be might be resolution independant. The article doesn’t elaborate on the benefit of this new feature. It’s a concept that has been a long time in coming.

While computer hardware and software have been increasing in speed/power exponentially these past several decades, the display has stagnated. The original Mac could display pixels at a resolution of 72ppi. Today, you’re lucky if your monitor pushes 120ppi. Not much of an improvement over 20 some years.

The problem is that because of this stagnation, computer OSes never had to care about the physical size of the display. They just went along assuming 1 pixel = 1 pixel. This means that for those of us that can push the higher PPI range, we are rewarded with a much sharper picture but, at the same time, an increasingly miniscule set of system widgets and on-screen text. We love the better picture, but hate the harder to read type.

What people need is higher resolutions that don’t scale down the key elements of the OS. This is where resolution independent rendering comes into play.

For us web developers, the biggest benefit is that it could finally bring an end to the old font size debate. With a truly resolution independent operating system, one could spec ‘12pt type’ and actually have it render as 12pt, regardless of the resolution or size of the display. Time will tell if Leopard will come through with this, but if they do, it’s a very promising step in the right directly. Then, we’d just have to wait another 5 years for MS to release their next update with the same feature and we’ll be set.