::scr Dressing up the computer

[Arvid Gidhagen]

> DPI. Of course, the problem here is pretty much all OSes are still
> built entirely on the concept of rendering pixels
> 
> Is anyone actually working on anything like this, though? Or are OS X
> and Cleartype just papering over an increasingly large crack?

What about Adobe's Display PostScript? I couldn't find any
information about how its "device-independentness" works in
detail, and it seems to have died a quiet death since none
of the documents are newer than the mid-1990s, so perhaps
it wasn't such a great idea.

In the older versions of Windows (before XP at least), a lot of
the visual elements (scrollbars, window borders etc) are easy
enough to resize. But people nowadays want flashy bitmapped skins
on everything, of course. Which is, as noted, a bad route to go
down. For instance, in Winamp you have the choice between tiny
undecipherable buttons or enormous, pixelized, double-sized
buttons. And the size-doubling doesn't work on the file list
either.

As games go ever further into 3D, OSes are taking the opposite
route and becoming ever more 2Dpixelbitmap-based. It's a
strange world.

- Arvid