Opinion

Leopard "Preview" - 512x512 Icons in Mac OS X and Quartz Debug

Another hint to the fact that Apple is working on Resolution Independence in Leopard is the inclusion of humongous 512x512 icons for some applications such as the Exposé wrapper and Safari.

Of course, I thought I'd take a peek in the Quartz Debug application that usually ships with the Developer Tools to see what changes have been made. For starters, Mac OS X scales slightly better with the UI Resolution but there is still an immense amount of work remaining to be done and most non-Apple applications (and even some Apple apps) rendered badly with the UI Resolution set to anything greater than 1.0 (the new Quartz Debug does not let you see it to less than 1.0/72di). And this is probably why this particular feature, probably one of the Top Secret ones in Leopard, wasn't demoed at the keynote - too incomplete. However, there are some other changes in Quartz Debug that might attract the attention of Mac fans. For example, Quartz 2D Extreme seems to have been renamed to QuartzGL and now remains enabled after you exit Quartz Debug.
In line with this, Quartz Debug now asks you if you want to keep using the new graphics settings you set or not. Handy.

Next up, the new face of Preview in Leopard. Also, it's surprising how much easier taking screenshots has become with Leopard… the number of tweaks to screenshot-taking added to Leopard probably rival Panther and Tiger taken together. I wish I could take a screenshot while taking a screenshot. I'll try that with SnapzProX. :-) 

Comments (4) Posted on at  ∞

  • » What's Exposé wrapper??
    By Blogger Prateek, at 2:46 pm, August 16, 2006   
  • » Exposé wrapper (icon pictured above in the entry) is simply an application, that, when double-clicked, will activate Exposé. Not a big breakthrough. Much like the Dashboard application - a wrapper.
    By Blogger Karan, at 3:32 pm, August 16, 2006   
  • » They're beautiful! Let's hope for a come-back of the Apple icon screensaver...
    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:51 am, August 17, 2006   
  • » Yeah… for those who don't know, Mac OS X 10.0 actually had a really cool screensaver that used to gather up all the icons from all the applications you had and showed them in a moving star-field sort of way (like the Windows star-field screensaver except with high-res icons instead of white dots). I don't know why they got rid of it.
    By Blogger Karan, at 11:30 pm, August 17, 2006   
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