::scr Dressing up the computer

[Paul Mison]

On 08/03/2002 at 20:39 +0000, Arvid Gidhagen wrote:

>But as the display screens get ever larger, maximizing everything seems
>like a waste of space.
>
>On a related tangent, I've been thinking about how large the screen
>can get in its present form. 19" screens are nice. 21" screens are
>nicer. But what about a 36" screen sitting on your desktop? If you
>have a really large screen as close to you as screens normally are
>today, you will actually have to move your head around to see things
>in the far corners of the screen. If you move the screen further
>away from you, you'll have to use larger text (and icons and whatever)
>to be able to read it, and so the point of having a larger screen is
>lost. Not to mention the fact that this setup takes up a lot of space.

There's a related issue in the fact that LCD screens, especially on
laptops, are constantly having their DPI counts ramped up; Simon B's
Dell has a 15" LCD running at 1600x1280 or so, which is a DPI of well
over 120, IIRC, whereas for a long time screens were much nearer 75
DPI. Of course, the problem here is pretty much all OSes are still
built entirely on the concept of rendering pixels, so on a large
screen, things are almost twice as small as the OS is expecting.

Of course, there's a really crap and easy way around this; make
everything bigger. This appears to be the rationale between OS X's
feeling of giganticism. The *right* way to do it is to make things
render to whatever the 'real' size of things is, by querying the
monitor and rescaling things, so instead of a 1024x768 display I'd have
a 25cm x 19cm display, and fonts would really render as points. (It
would also make CSS much easier to implement right, but that's another
matter.)

Is anyone actually working on anything like this, though? Or are OS X
and Cleartype just papering over an increasingly large crack?

--
:: paul
:: macintosh!