Hardware, Mac Jeff Greenberg Hardware, Mac Jeff Greenberg

More on the Retina display...

From the Engadget review "The primary Apple apps -- Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. -- have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible."

Read More
Hardware, Mac Jeff Greenberg Hardware, Mac Jeff Greenberg

MacBook Pro Retina Display - interesting choices

If you are an Apple Fan, you saw the announcements yesterday.

For me personally, the big question was about the new MacBook Pro. I'm overdue by about a year (last time was 2009, and I swore, I'd buy and dump after a year...and forgot...and forgot.)  Also, my wife is overdue for a system as well.

The new Retina display has to be my new machine. I need a system that has a great (read HD) display, I need an SSD (less moving parts) and it has to have thunderbolt.

On the great side, the new MBP is thinner (yay!) and has USB 3.0 (a sore spot from Apple, especiaily on the MacPro line.)

I was wondering in this blog post exactly how they'd handle the problem of a denser display without the ability to increase the font size. Since 10.7 doesn't have an independent resolution and doesn't permit customizations, all I would see is small fonts. Or, should I say, wouldn't see, because it'd be too dense.

It looks like Apple is taking a page out of the iPad - they're doubling the resolution from 1440x900 to 2880 x 1800.

Retina System Pref

From what I've read, Apple is rendering the screen twice. It's got some scaled resolutions, such as 1440x900 and 1680x1050.

This will be a nightmare at the 'Retina' resolution, for Applications that are mired in old code. I'm dying to work at actually 1920x1080 or above, since I work with video, and my struggle is going to be the problem of seeing text in those apps.

Apple's perspective, is likely, if they don't follow our rules, screw them. Or work at a smaller resolution. I'm terrifically curious - for years (5 or so), There's been the claim that Apple is going to have resolution independence - fonts/menus/etc could be the same regardess of the resolution.  Each iteration of the OS, it's mentioned as a beta feature and then disappears.

I have a couple of apps that I'm really worried of how OSX will render them. Avid Media Composer is my #1 worry - but I'll be curious how fixed font sizes look in some of the other apps.

Read More