From one of those above links:

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Now, on to the question of what people prefer. Jeff Atwood's post from yesterday comparing the two font technologies side-by-side generated rather predictable heat: Apple users liked Apple's system, while Windows users liked Microsoft's system. This is not just standard fanboyism; it reflects the fact that when you ask people to choose a style or design that they prefer, unless they are trained, they will generally choose the one that looks most familiar.

Listen, sorry, I'm not buying that. Although it *is* true that people will tend to prefer things simply because it may be all they have known, Mac users have indeed known other ways of rendering fonts. Apart from the few digikid late-comers, any Mac user who has used OS 9 knows BOTH sides of this argument, especially if they have used the OS 9 interface (optimized with nice screen fonts) and programs such as Adobe Illustrator which sacrifices legibility for giving a truer rendering of the font.

Two words explain the above quote: crap settling. Most Mac users are familiar with Windows. Few people these days are Mac-only. A lot of people either have a Windows machine (for games and such) or work with Windows at work or work next to someone who does. And you'd have to be an idiot not to notice the difference. Legibility is not a preference. It's something that is much more objective than that. I have no doubt that you could smear Vaseline on a brand spankin' new iMac monitor and tons of Mac users would say they preferred it over Windows' font rendering. But there is focused and there is unfocused. Soft-focus has it's place, mostly in things like portraiture, but not type. A large proportion of Mac users are crap settlers. That is a much simpler explanation than to say that it's just a matter of Mac users learning one way and Windows users another. Hogwash. Legible is legible. This is much less a matter of opinion than people think. After all, when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get your new driver's license, you have to take an eye test. You pass if you can read the letters. You fail if you can't. And when you can't, those letters look much more like the letters rendered in OS X than rendered in XP or Vista.

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Which is why Apple engineers probably feel like they're doing a huge service to the Windows community, bringing their "superior" font rendering technology to the heathens, and it explains why Windows users are generally going to think that Safari's font rendering is blurry and strange and they don't know why, they just don't like it. Actually they're thinking... "Whoa! That's different. I don't like different. Why don't I like these fonts? Oh, when I look closer, they look blurry. That must be why."

Good god. Talk about being steeped in denial and perhaps toadyism. Listen, I do understand that many people like fonts and darn near everything that have anti-aliased edges. A lot of people think that looks cool and that anything not anti-aliased is de facto primitive and un-cool. I'm not denying that. But that is more a cultural or esthetic factor, not an objective legibility factor. When the government chooses the typefaces for signs along the highway, they had better not have on their minds what is cool. They better have on their minds what is legible. Same thing with interfaces. Highway signs are not supposed to be a medium for the Secretary of Transportation to show his or her artistic flair. Such things as road signs are objects meant to impart information and to do so as clearly, efficiently, and unambiguously as possible.

Why is this simple truth being forgotten? Why these twists of pretzel logic wherein objective factors such as legibility are dismissed entirely and everything is put down to that mind-numbingly vapid idea of "Whoa! That's different. I don't like different. Why don't I like these fonts? Oh, when I look closer, they look blurry. That must be why"? Maybe the god damn fonts are actually blurry and Windows users (who Mac users love to derive for getting used to crap and thinking it excellent) haven't yet been dumbed-down like most Mac users have.

What keeps getting left out of the debate is SCALE, and that's all important. We need to remember that Apple's font rendering, on their LCD monitors, looks great... but only at BIG SIZES. As you get below, say 13 or 14px, they begin to mush up. The aliased look of fonts at that size is now familiar to digikids, and crisper screen fonts look jaggy to them. They prefer soft focus because it looks more atmospheric.

But remember what generation we're talking about. Digikids can barely friggin' read. They don't buy books, they have the attention spans of infant baboons. They don't spend enough time with large blocks of screen text, that they give a crap how clear and high-contrast it is at smaller sizes. They'd rather just blow it up and go "WHAT font-rendering problems?"

I'm reading posts at thalo.net, and they're fairly readable, a bit mushy but OK. But the text is in 13 point type or bigger. The browser window takes up a third of my 30" monitor. I'd rather it be half the size it is, with smaller fonts. Just because, being ENTERTAINMENT, it's not the most important thing on my screen.

Finder lists are the same way. Think of how much I could view onscreen at a glance if I could use old-school GENEVA 9, pixelated, in Finder lists? I'd be twiddling so much less with my windows. Email, same deal. I get so many bazillions of emails, I want to see all the subjects small, then decide which ones to open, which to trash. A smaller font allows this. But I don't want it if I can't read it.

If there was a set of tiny pixelated screen fonts (picture non-aliased vector Flash fonts as an example) in the interface... X-Men wouldn't be FORCED to use them, but pros could CHOOSE to use them to make the Mac interface less...well, DIGIKID.

Apple needs to understand that pros don't want a big splashy interface. We don't need giant preschool icons and big target buttons. The smaller and more compact the interface, the more room there is for important stuff, like work.

It's great to zoom in on text in our page layout programs... but in the interface, many of us want to just pick a barebones utility font that's readable and smalll, and keep our interfaces minimal.

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But remember what generation we're talking about. Digikids can barely friggin' read. They don't buy books, they have the attention spans of infant baboons.

Aren't you being a little hard on the beaver, Ward? Those infant baboons are kind of cute.

What keeps getting left out of the debate is SCALE, and that's all important. We need to remember that Apple's font rendering, on their LCD monitors, looks great... but only at BIG SIZES. As you get below, say 13 or 14px, they begin to mush up.

I agree about scale. But it all relates to the same thing - what works better for communicating information (letterforms) and the physics of computer screens and their resolutions. Larger letters have much more physical room to tack on a grey anti-aliased pixel here or there to potentially enhance a letterform and not overwhelm it. When the AA pixels are a small percentage of the letterforms, I'd argue that they can perhaps increase legibility. (And I'm willing to acquiesce to any objective tests that may have already been done that show this -- but I think it's quite possible that legibility is unaffected.) But when those AA pixels make up basically 50% of the letters at small point sizes, then instead of rendering letters you're just rendering a blurred shadow, halo, or outline. This is all old stuff, of course. You've gone into great detail regarding this before. But the point seems to remain that science is being thrown out the window. And often when objective arguments are even attempted to be raised you have various lame-brains like this guy in that one article dismissing such objective considerations as mere matters of opinion. That is about as anti-rational as you can get. And I think it would be helpful to remember that the original Mac was great in large part because it made sense. It used rational and objective means of measuring how people might best interface with computers rather than just falling back on what was easy for geeks to program or what computer power geeks would condescend to give to the masses. That was the old barrier, but new ones have been erected, and frankly, we're talking about barriers that have been erected by anti-intellectual shallow marketing-type nose pickers. And these new barriers need to come down too. And it is irony of ironies that Apple is, this time, leading the construction of this Berlin Wall of superabundant nonsense.

Yes, Apple has market-engineered the whole mess. And like I've said something more than a google times in the past, it has grown from a fundamental disdain and underestimation for the user base. Apple continually tries to fool us, because they think we're easily fooled.

Since they've sold their soul, it's all about what they can get away with, not about doing the best JOB at anything, or creating the best computers FOR us. Nah-ah, it's about imagining a rube, predicting how that rube will react to x, y, or z... and then building stuff they think we'll swallow.

Apple's cult status in the last five years has allowed them to make free money off of us, without doing squat for it. Doing the bare minimum. The whiz-bang showoff crap is out of control, because Apple genuinely believes that that is the best way to separate a digi-chimp from their money. They could care less about increasing our productivity or giving us good tools. They're getting rich off of the postmodern knee-jerk reaction to cool special effects and elegant hardware design.

They know that WANTING a tricorder to work will get people to spend money on something that PRETENDS to be a tricorder, without actually doing the JOB that a "real" tricorder is supposed to do.

Apple is great at getting us to buy dreams and broken promises, and never really having to deliver. And I continue to assert: it's not that they CAN'T deliver... Cupertino, I'm sure, is full of talent, and willing chessclub brains that COULD in fact change the world.

But why bother working hard when the con makes just as much money? My only hope is that the MacLash makes the Mac Faithful more informed consumers, and that'll stop Apple from thinking they can get away with what they usually do. Cranking out overhyped products that don't really work.

We've had OS X for how many years now? And I defy anyone to tell me that it isn't still a beta. That everything works, and makes sense. Because it just doesn't. The devil is in the details, and the details of the Mac OSX operating system have never been right. The illustration I keep using is SERVICES. The idea of pan-application services is wonderful... in practice? It's like been on the back burner forever. OK, I'm in safari right now. I select some text, go up to "Make new Sticky Note"... um. Nothin'.

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Speaking of the Apple cult, you've all seen the video this week of the fanboys who have such empty, do-nothing lives that they can camp out on the sidewalk for days to kiss Steve Jobs' ass...I mean, to get the first iPhones this evening. A fucking PHONE.

You have to wonder how such slackers can afford such an expensive toy. In addition to the phone itself and the monthly AT&T plan, you can't even activate the thing unless you also subscribe to iTunes. Plus, everything else you see this device from God doing in the TV commercials will require another fee. I guess mom and dad will be subsidizing the sticker shock.
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Apologize for going on-topic, but I was just now on Safari with version three and using the search mode. I wondered where the friggin' dialog box was when I hit Command+F. It was nowhere to be found. But then I saw that in the upper right of the browser window it opened a little Spotlight-like window. I'll come back to that, but what I *did* like was that it clearly highlighted the words that I searched for and that it found in the browser window. I can't tell you have many times I've gone all buggy and head-banging when I searched for some term in a web browser, the search is apparently successful, but I can't find where the hell the found search term is highlighted. But whether Safari's method of highlighting found terms is overkill or not (and I'm tending toward "not" at the moment), Safari 3 dims the web page, highlights the first found instance of the search term in orange with a white outline (I do think this is all a bit over the top) and then highlights any other found instances of the search term by highlighting it in white. At first glance, I really don't mind the overkill in terms of highlighting that first found search item in orange with a white outline. God knows how much time I've wasted scouring a web page for a found search term that was highlighted in a way not easily seen among the clutter of the typical web page these days. I'm going to give kudos to Apple designers for showing the rest of the friggin' world how this might be done better. Way to go, guys and gals. Now get off your collective asses and implement a "reopen last closed page/tab" feature and/or figure out some better way to close a tab other than to have a friggin' close box on each and every one of them.

Now, as for the Spotlight-like wedge of a window that appears at the top of the browser window when you invoke a search: I'm all for saving screen real estate, but I wonder if that search box shouldn't remain visible at all times. But I've found Spotlight-type searches to be problematic no matter where they are done. You're basically changing modes by invoking the Spotlight search, whether in a Finder window or a web browser, and this can be a bit confusing. I think a better approach would be a button that allowed you to toggle the highlighted found items on or off. And you can kinda sort do this via the "matches found" arrow widgets which are just to the left of the search field box. But something still just doesn't feel right. I think Apple has improved this process but still have a couple things left to work out. This feature is better than junk drawer and yet it still has some junk drawer qualities about it. It can be improved, made smoother, more intuitive, more integrated.

Speaking of the Apple cult, you've all seen the video this week of the fanboys who have such empty, do-nothing lives that they can camp out on the sidewalk for days to kiss Steve Jobs' ass...I mean, to get the first iPhones this evening. A fucking PHONE

Markle, hearing of such things makes me feel a WHOLE lot better about my own life. If a Playboy Bunny was giving away free looks on a first come, first served (no pun intended) basis, I might indeed camp out on the sidewalk. But for a phone? JHC, that's just getting downright pathetic. The Borg is not such a science fiction fantasy after all. Camping out on a sidewalk for silicon chips wrapped in some fancy plastic. That's what it amounts to.

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The idea of pan-application services is wonderful... in practice? It's like been on the back burner forever. OK, I'm in safari right now. I select some text, go up to "Make new Sticky Note"... um. Nothin'.

Well, i tried that and it worked somehow. But if the app "Notizzettel" (or english name, i dunno) isn't launched yet, selecting this just starts the app, nothing happens. If the app is launched it works. Is this crapsettling? I hope not.

Stickies is always on on my computer. I tried it both ways. Still nothin.' This is the Safari public beta v. 3.0.2, so they have an excuse. This really is a beta, they're being honest. It's obviously supposed to be that we do the testing and development for Apple once again.

I don't know if you guys ever have the patience to turn on CONSOLE, and just watch how much shit actually fucks up day after day. It's kinda sobering. What's today, June 29? There are probably 400 errors in my log, just for today. Safari, iPhoto, Mail, Directory Service, various widgets, and on and on.

I can't believe the Mac Faithful are still camping out, money in hand, waiting to give dollars away free for the dream. It's so Lord of the Rings. So Trekkie. They are sweet folks that Apple is manipulating. They get conned, and it's thank you Steve, may I have another?

I really hope they get the jollies out of the iPhone that they're looking for. Like any Mac Faithful, I want it to work. It would be great if it did. It's just I know better. THE CATCH is lurking... it's out there.

Okay. I'm game to do a little free testing for Apple. Let me select some text in the Safari 3 browser window, choose an available service, and...





Hmm. If you can't do something appropriate with the selection, the service should be grayed out. Looks like the service menu is just one big, steamin' crap pile of stuff that nobody figured out what to do with yet.

Fuck, i'm also using Safari 3.02 beta. And it works the way i described. Well, OS X is obviously behaving unpredictable...
Those apple-sheep would also pay for a brick with an apple-logo stamped on, honestly.

I just noticed that Safari 3 has under the History menu "Reopen last closed window." I missed that earlier -- obviously. This is an improvement. Too bad, though that it won't reopen it into a tab if it was a tab that you last closed. So while that feature isn't worthless, it's only half of a solution to what should be a rather trivial programming problem.

I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 7 for XP yesterday. I'm underwhelmed. Yes, it has tabbed browsing. That is nice. But one of the features I use most in a browser is enlarging the font size. On a high-res LCD you find yourself having to do that a lot in order to read something. Firefox is the only browser I know of that does this well. Most browsers (including IE 7) just have two or three settings for the font size, and even then it often doesn't work. And simply enlarging the whole web page doesn't help if that means that a good chunk of the page horizontally is now scrolled off the screen. Safari enlarges fonts just fine but unfortunately I have yet to find a way to turn of anti-aliasing. You really don't need it at all on a good LCD monitor, and the AA bluring (despite what anyone says or claims) just makes it less legible. I actually ran across a post by a guy the other day. IE 7 comes with AA turned on. This guy said to be sure to try it that way first before turning it off. He said that when he first used it his eyes hurt, but after a while he got used to it and preferred it.

That's a bit of self-deluding crap settling right there. So it's a must that AA can be turned off in a web browser. Firefox is still king. IE 7 is better in some ways, but still rates a "meh." You ought to see the bigatude it throws at the tabs. The tabs are huge. You'd think a multi-billion dollar software company could make a better browser than some opensource effort. But Microsoft can't do it, and neither can Apple, although both browsers have some nice features. But they fail where it counts – reading internet content on the screen comfortably with lots of sensible customizability.