uh oh I actually like the sound of this.

quote:

Brad Goldberg, general manager of Windows product development at Microsoft, said the new name was aimed at "communicating the idea of clarity."

"That lets users focus on the things they need to focus on," Goldberg said.

Clarity. Ahhhh, wouldn't it be friggin' GREAT??? I have noticed Microsoft IP numbers have visited this site... maybe THEY are listening to us, and maybe THEY will be the first ones to discover Less is More, and consequently THEY will be the ones to initiate the MacLash.

I've always said, the first one to give people the best user experience, without all the fucking BS, wins.

At least M$ has allowed more tweaking of UI-Stuff and Fonts - I hope this stays with Vista. Contrary to Apple - If you use Apple eat the pie or die.

M$ has to offer more choice because they can't rely on a cultish fanbase as Apple does. They are under massive pressure and gazillions of users, thus also more critical and technical knowledge-ridden users. I welcome more choice, I'm curious what the new "Vista" will finally offer.

Still using X and 9.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: smithz,

Reminds me a bit of Apple back in the day. The user base, mostly pros, was always more critical and as you say "knowlege-ridden" (love that!).

I really think that HELPS computer platforms. Newbies and casual users, don't. They're too easy to fool.

Being able to tweak the UI is something that has to come back to the Mac, no ifs ands or buts. Type rendering needs to be much better too. I have a PC now, and that Cleartype is just so much better looking in the interface than Lucida Mushé.

I'm also sick to death of non-iconic icons, and huge dropped out icon labels. I liked it much better when the icon labels were the smallest mousetype in the interface. I wouldn't mind it dropping out, say on DARK desktop patterns (automatically)... if it were crisp and pixelated.

I need the Mac UI to stop wasting MY screen real estate. I need more control over how much visual information to display. Right now the interface dominates. When it should be the WORK that dominates.

The unholy trend goes "Get a bigger display, fill it with UI and end up having the same screen-estate as before". This is the result of "Screen resolutions have dramatically increased" (S. Jobs). It's really scary, even good friends of me are using horrible big fonts now. Using a big display and filling that up. I'm on the wrong planet I think. I constantly begin to scratch my head until it bleeds.

Font-Rendering is still really inconsistent. Using Bitmaps sucks, using AA sucks too. Lucida Grande looks quite good at IMHO exactly ONE size (I think it's 11pt).

Make it smaller -> Sucks. Bigger-> Sucks, but at sizes above 14 or so it doesn't matter anyway. I should dump my glasses and get some glasses with low optical specs - makes the whole crap fuzzy and cozy.
Textshadows still suck a lamas ass, i can't believe this non-functional thing is still non-tweakable and still not functioning. (Hint you get all the time: Use Labels as a workaround - OMFG!)

Besides I'm running X for 5 days without pause - mainly due to online-research and downloading reasons.

I agree, Lucida has maybe one small size that's reasonably clear. And I really think they ended up having to tweak the living piss out of it because of user feedback complaints...

But that's the only way Lucida has been made to work... each face gets massaged up the wazoo, individually. But ALL sizes don't work, as they should in Aqua, which is supposed to have this great shrink-n-grow thing. But the reality is, the AAing is too stupid to composite at every size. I get the feeling that every lucida size is getting AA'd manually, and they simply haven't gotten to every size.

On the large sizes, the auto "dumb" aliasing works, only because it's easier for our eyes to resolve larger letterforms... as I used to try to explain, it's all about the relative percentage of antialiasing pixels compared to the overall letterform pixels.

At this point, the only way I think fonts are going to look really spectacular in OS X, is if monitor resolution becomes so unbelievably high, that the "dumb" aliasing would be a nonissue. I'm picturing a day when there is double the amount of pixels per inch on a TFT display... that might do it.

I still think that we should have the FLEXIBILITY to use bitmap fonts IN THE INTERFACE. To "freeze" all the shrink/grow crap in instances where we don't really use it. But Apple is too worried about how awful pixelated fonts would look when you "play" with the icon size sliders.

quote:

But ALL sizes don't work, as they should in Aqua, which is supposed to have this great shrink-n-grow thing. But the reality is, the AAing is too stupid to composite at every size. I get the feeling that every lucida size is getting AA'd manually, and they simply haven't gotten to every size.

yeah, it's called hinting. Hinting information embedded into the font data optimizes the rasterization at certain sizes. At the beginning of X i assume Apple had no hinting data at all or the rendere just didn't care. Hm.

On the other hand it is IMHO simply not possible to gain a pixel-accurate result at every size, even the best type-rendering engines can't deliver that. Now that's why we need a more specific font-prefpanel. So you could choose your fav size which looks best. But we have no control about nothing and end up in blur'o'rama.

quote:

At this point, the only way I think fonts are going to look really spectacular in OS X, is if monitor resolution becomes so unbelievably high, that the "dumb" aliasing would be a non-issue.

Absolutely. Apple's waiting for this to happen. Of course they have to upgrade the whole UI to be resolution independent. But this simply hasn't happened yet.

quote:

I still think that we should have the FLEXIBILITY to use bitmap fonts IN THE INTERFACE. To "freeze" all the shrink/grow crap in instances where we don't really use it. But Apple is too worried about how awful pixelated fonts would look when you "play" with the icon size sliders.

Err, if you alter the icon size, that does nothing to the fonts. Do i have misunderstood this?
Besides, i totally agree. Sadly nowadays Bitmaps have a bad reputation in mainstream-media because "bad" bitmap fonts look really scary contrary to the perfect appearance of handpixeled, optimized-for-one-size bitmaps.
In the end, flexibility in the font department would solve all those problems. For noobs AND for tweakers.

quote:

Err, if you alter the icon size, that does nothing to the fonts. Do i have misunderstood this?

No, you're right. Sorry, just a brain fart. Shows you how often I twiddle icon sizes

Absolutely, flexibility in the font department. Especially in the interface. The stuff I most want to change is Finder fonts/icon labels, and menus. I also want more flexibility in icon color. I want the system to recognize if I've picked a DARK highlight color (like um, BLACK?) and drop out the text to white, like the golden age Mac UI.

To me, a perfectly readable and effective UI font is the tried and true Geneva 9, pixelated. I find it easy on the eyes, and familiar. I want it back for Finder lists. I'd take Monaco 9 too. I still can't figure out why Monaco 10 looks good in the terminal, and Monaco 9 has the pooched spacing.

quote:

I still can't figure out why Monaco 10 looks good in the terminal, and Monaco 9 has the pooched spacing.

That's a bloody mistery to me, too. I (again)assume (Cr)Apple simply doesn't care about how this or that font is rendered without AA. Coders seem to like monaco 10 or any other fixed-width font at 10pt (e.g. courier). So Apple fixed this single font. All of this IMHO, of coz'.

If you want a real laugh, check out GENEVA in the terminal. Tracked out like crazy. Makes absolutely no sense to me why that would be. Geneva would have made a great terminal font. But not like that.