“Compared with Mac OS 9, running under OS X feels like someone smeared Vaseline all over my monitor. I have uncorrected vision, and I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible. But prolonged exposure to Mac OS X–particularly its anti-aliased text–really peeves my eyeballs. The abundant anti-aliasing is just one of the many problems I have with the Aqua interface. The gratuitous shadows around windows eat up screen real estate that I would rather keep to myself. I’m greedy with my pixels and don’t like it when Aqua absconds with them.” The editorial is at ZDNews, while OSAlert reader Doug Gruber submitted the news for the second part of the story “Why I don’t own a Mac“.
Hey Apple, Give me Visual Clarity!
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I find OSX tremendously attractive from a technical PoV – I’m planning on getting a laptop for my frequent trips away, and as a safety feature I want it to be either Mac or Linux ( My desktops run Win98 and XP )
an iBook is the obvious choice, but I’d want the ability to select UI colours for myself. I have no complaints about the dock or Finder X but the colours of OSX are incredibly irritating to me. As a result of surgery to correct divergent squint over 15 years ago I have acutely sensitive eyesight – I have to wear shades in all weather
In a computer I need a UI that I can set to dark colours
Windows XP is the best thing that ever happened for me since KDE 2!!!! with only a very little tweaking it makes a clear, fresh appearance with no bright hues at all.
OSX, apparently, wont let me do this.. even the Graphite option shown on apples website is VERY light and confused by SO MANY horizontal lines across the UI which, to my damaged eyes, make the whole interface blurry
Until such a time as i can adjust all the UI colours I will not buy a Mac. I have comfort needs which Apples UI can not meet – I dare say I am far from alone in this
If only, like in XP, there was an option to switch to Classic macOS appearance, or a platinuum theme. I will shortly be buying a used G3 powerbook off eBay.. macOS 8.6, bit of extra RAM.. just what i need.
Stephan Somogyi’s commentary is exactly what there needs to be more of in regards to MacOSX. He’s right on target. My only disagreement with him was that windows should be “application grouped” which I no longer agree with (having become much more in tuned with the document-centric windowing I have in BeOS). Granted, his argument is still valid because he notes that MacOSX has (still) no built in window-access device such as a “taskbar.” Therefore, it is indeed a pain in the butt to find windows among many. This is a problem MacOS has had since day one and is why I still prefer the BeOS system (which, really, is an improvement on the Win9x method).
Well I don’t seem to find a problem with Mac OS X and it’s visual clarity other than I think it looks better on an LCD display than a CRT display. I get nothing but compliments on how Mac OS X looks on my Ti-Book G4 at work… everyones seems to agree that Mac OS (and even Solaris) implement graphics colors best. I have found both Windows and Linux to be lacking in this area, especially depicting true color variations, with Linux being the worst (no pun intended torwards Linux, I like using it). But I have came to the conclusion of why a lot of Desktop Publishers and Graphics Artists choose the Mac for their work, it does a very good job of rendering true quality in colors and so forth. I should know, I have to develop mimic displays for spacecraft related stuff and I use to implement the graphics on Windows and shove it over to Solaris for implementing, but it was a major headache between the 2 when it came to color definition. Ever since I have been using the Mac (Ti-Book) I have had no problems.
The only thing I do complain about it Aqua’s too colorful look (XP is worse though), so I now use the either the ‘SilverFox’ and/or ‘Classic Platinum’ theme to reduce the color scheme. It seems to help
there is one?
Does it colour all the stuff or just buttons?
“Shadows eat up screen real estate?” I’m sorry, your reality check just bounced. You can see through the shadows. They’re just visual cues about which window is in front; if anything their purpose is to make it possible to show this without highlighted borders. Some people may prefer the borders (and you can make a case for that from a usability standpoint), but the shadows require less screen real estate.
As for anti-aliasing, I think it’s a matter of taste. The reality is that all major commercial desktop OSes have been anti-aliasing text for years (Windows since Windows 95, and MacOS since MacOS 9, I think–not counting the widely-deployed Adobe Type Manager for about a decade before that!). What polarizes people about OS X seems to be that it anti-aliases in a similar manner to Acrobat Reader–not just to smooth out text a little, but to represent text on screen the same way it would be represented on paper.
I originally bought into the complaints about OS X’s font rendering system being “less advanced” because it didn’t follow font hinting, but realized that that’s intentional: Acrobat doesn’t, either. Font hinting assumes that the onscreen rendering system is less sophisticated than OS X’s, because OS X’s approach is computationally expensive–the hinting allows a faster, less precise anti-aliasing algorithm to look better. OS X doesn’t follow hinting because it doesn’t have to.
I’m going to grump here, OS News folks. We seem to get a lot of links to articles and even opinion pieces telling us why PowerPCs are slow, why Apples are overpriced, and why we shouldn’t like Aqua’s anti-aliasing. Links to articles about how Final Cut Pro 3 is eating into Avid’s market, O’ReillyNet’s article on how AltiVec really works (and why the unofficial benchmark referenced on OS News not too long ago probably didn’t take it into account after all), Apple’s OS-level support of BlueTooth don’t seem to happen.
I can’t help observing that ever since Eugenia didn’t get that under-$1K iMac G4 announcement she was publicly hoping for (back when iLamp was announced), there’s been an apparent effort here to slant Apple coverage toward presumed flaws in various Apple strategies. We shouldn’t be blind cheerleaders, and we can all have opinions on whether Apple’s strategy is good, but I trust we’re not going to suffer Sour Grape Syndrome because that strategy doesn’t appeal to the white-box PC segment we’re part of.
The dock and the taskbar are very similar in XP, as I found out last night. Both only show the application in the bar, and have popups for the active windows of that application. In fact, that is why I bought a two-button mouse for my Mac. It made going between windows of an application a snap. Simply right-click on the icon of the running application in the dock and all active windows are in a convienent list. Pretty snazzy.
I also have to take to task his not liking the anti-aliasing. I don’t know how it looks on an LCD, but on a CRT it works great. I find the view much more pleasant under OS X than any other OS.
To be honest I haven’t noticed a trend either way for apple articles (I’m not a fan of apple so I don’t pay much attention), but I will say that this is the only site I’ve been too that even tries to be even handed (well other then like zd and cnet). In fact this site is the only reason I stopped into an apple store yesterday to play around with the new imac again. Since no one I talk to regularly uses a mac (even my web designer friend and my graphic artist friend use windows pcs) the only place I hear anything about macs is here and other sites (most of which are too busy hating ms and saying linux will save us all to actually say something interesting about mac). So I guess I’m saying all publicity is good publicity.
Font hinting assumes that the onscreen rendering system is less sophisticated than OS X’s, because OS X’s approach is computationally expensive–the hinting allows a faster, less precise anti-aliasing algorithm to look better. OS X doesn’t follow hinting because it doesn’t have to.
Wrong. Even Quartz cannot make up for the laughable resolution a screen has compared to a printer. Rendering fonts on and off screen the same way is just ignoring the fact that the two media are significantly different.
What counts for on-screen text after all is readability, not prettyness. Maybe your first thought when seeing a Quartz-rendered font is “oh, that looks like printed” but after reading it for a while the lack of contrast is really disturbing. Especially a small Verdana font, like it is very popular on web sites these days, is close to unreadable in Omniweb.
Another “Eugenia’s biased against company X” conspiracy theory.
OS X *is* too blurry. It *is* too light. And it’s totally irrelevant what coworkers at the office think when they check it out. What matters is the people who use the OS day in and day out. Mac OS lovers noticed every detail that made it nice. Mac OS X users are complaining because usability was sacrificed for distant beauty.
And no, most OSes have *not* anti-aliased all screen text. It’s only been done very recently. Take some screen shots and zoom in on them with Photoshop or whatever, and look closely. Win 98? Mac OS 7 through 9? Most X displays? No anti-aliasing. Now a few select apps like some word processors, etc., have done that. But they usually do it only for the “paper” display — not for menus, dialogs, etc.
>>there is one?
Does it colour all the stuff or just buttons?<<
Yeah just go to this site and download what theme fits you best…
http://xthemination.maccustomise.com/themes/
http://www.ResExcellence.com/themes/
*there are others, but this will point you in the right direction
Theme Utilities…
http://www.enteract.com/~doc/charonsoft/index.html
http://www.conundrumsoft.com/
Theme Editor…
http://www.geekspiff.com/software/themepark
Enjoy
> I can’t help observing that ever since Eugenia didn’t get that under-$1K iMac G4 announcement she was publicly hoping for (back when iLamp was announced), there’s been an apparent effort here to slant Apple coverage toward presumed flaws in various Apple strategies.
And you seem to forget the rest 80% of the Apple-related articles on OSAlert that are FOR Apple, not against it. And as for this editorial, it has been written by the Mac guy at ZDNews. It is not a slant of him, he is a MacOSX user. As for the second article, it was submitted to us, and I had actually deleted it from our submission database, but later I saw that editorial at ZDNews and decided to do one story for both, instead of two different “slants”.
thanks… that could be just the thing I need.
Just spent half an hour reading apples website on OSX – nowhere does it mention that the UI is themeable. Bad planning, that.
After years of WinXX, I got a Powerbook G4 running OSX. For the first time in my computing history, I can actually read docs for a long time, on the computer. I have no idea how you can say that the screen isn’t clear.
>>Just spent half an hour reading apples website on OSX – nowhere does it mention that the UI is themeable. Bad planning, that.<<
I think Apple doesn’t want OS X to be theme-able, which I think is ridiculous. I remember when I first saw the Aqua IU, I said to myself “no way am I going to run that on my Mac!”… but when Apple said it was going to be UNIX under the hood, I just couldn’t resist. But I do like Aqua for the most part.
It’s just an impression. Subjectively, it seems articles here are more likely to carry a subtext of “why you shouldn’t be that impressed by Apple or the PowerPC” than they’re likely to carry a positive slant about the topics. Maybe if I did a statistical analysis on all the Apple coverage on OSAlert since the iLamp, that impression would go away.
As for the person who said that OSes didn’t have anti-aliasing until very recently: I stand by my assertion. Visit http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/ttalias.htm (describing it in Windows 95) and http://www.macfrontier.com/reviews/macos851.shtml (describing it in MacOS 8.5.1).
Stew, I too use Omniweb, although I don’t use Verdana–which may well be a poor choice with OS X’s rendering engine, since Verdana, Georgia and Trebuchet were specifically optimized for onscreen display without Quartz’s level of anti-aliasing. Quartz’s display is a better representation of the printed page in precisely the same way a PDF is a better representation of the printed page than Microsoft Word’s WYSIWYG display is. No more and no less. I spend a great deal of time with my PowerBook G4, I use Quartz-driven applications as much as possible, and I rarely suffer eyestrain–which can’t be said for the time I’ve spent in front of my completely non-aliased FreeBSD workstation at work. I suspect this has as much to do with CRT vs. LCD as anything else, though.
No, not everybody likes the look. This has been a point of debate for years, though. Ideally, screens would be at least 200 dpi and the entire issue would be rendered moot. Until that happens, I’ll prefer well anti-aliased text to all but the best-designed screen fonts. Terminal windows look fine without aliasing, but they’re usually san-serif monospaced fonts. Most serif proportional fonts, to my eye, look terrible when they’re not anti-aliased, frequently to the point of making it difficult to tell whether a space is a true space or an interletter space displayed incorrectly. (And don’t even try to tell me a terminal window in 9- or 10-point unaliased Courier is comfortable reading…)
I too would say that there’s been a slant. He’s right: no mention of BlueTooth, no mention of the AltiVec articles, etc. Most Apple news on here tends to be negative, I’d say, in a time when most Apple news across the board is pretty positive. 80% Eugenia? Name ’em. Do that statistical analysis since January. Go ahead: list the headline of every Apple article since January 10…
“More Operating Systems
Development Tools
Visual Studio.NET Pro
As for anti-aliasing, I think it’s a matter of taste. The reality is that all major commercial desktop OSes have been anti-aliasing
text for years (Windows since Windows 95, and MacOS since MacOS 9, I think–not counting the widely-deployed Adobe
Type Manager for about a decade before that!).”
You are confusing anti-aliasing (which uses extra colors) with hinting
(which does a more sophisticated rendering but still in 1 bit).
Adobe Type Manager does hinting, not anti-aliasing. I only see
anti-aliasing in Acrobat readers.
To my eyes, anti-aliased type just looks blurry. In 3D rendering,
OTOH, anti-aliasing is essential.
While Theming is not that issue for me (Aqua is o.k.) – the eyes – hurting ANTI-ALIASING – Orgsm really drive me nuts!
A complete shit.
When I sit on a Gnome desktop or even on a NT WS Desktop everything is pretty clear, sharply rendered (I never start to compare a XP or BeOS-Desktop – what brilliant sharp desktops are these ?(BeOS through Bitstream if I’m not wrong)).
Not so on OS X: everything is smoothened, your eyes try to refocus – but after a time you have to deal with it.
On the other side they try to compensate it with higher Gamma & saturation marks (your iMac TFT will love that
.
But if you lokk out of the window & your eyes are o.k., you see the reality:ahh everything is sharp & clear.
Can’t understand to count that as ‘more ergonomic’ – pah.
Does anyone got a clue how to get this PDF-scenario properly sharpened ?
greetz
As much as I like to bash Eugenia, I think your analysis of the facts is way off base.
No mention of Altivec article?
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=906
Other positive news? Read it:
http://www.osnews.com/topic.php?icon=14
80%? Nope, but it’s not exactly negative.
Oh, and for the record, IMO, Macs are too expensive, and as much as I like them, I’m not investing that level of $ in a desktop.
If I were in the market for a new laptop, then maybe, but if I were to get a laptop now, it would be to supplement my main machine, and I’d probably get a 2nd hand, x86 notebook from work.
My opinion:
You don’t like anti-aliased text in OS X??
-> Switch it off!
You don’t like OS X?
-> Don’t use it!
You don’t like Mac’s?
-> Don’t own one!
So what’s the real problem here???
I can’t deal with antialiasing so I turn it always off (at least in M$ OSes, the more OSX-savvy should tell everyone else in the forum how to do it in OSX, if at all possible).
Dimitris
I’m not against AA, not at all. I’m against the way how MacOS X renders fonts at incorrect sizes, ignoring all the hinting done by the font designers.
AA itself is great, I love the way text looks in BeOS and I really wish I had subpixel hinting available on my iBook.
It has to be said that the majority if not most of the anti OsX UI critisims out there comes from longtime MacOS users who are for all intents and purposes the most reactionary computer users out there.
They tend to whine a lot aroud transition times but quiet down after a while.
I remember how bad the noise was around Apples traansition from a flat linear looking interface to a 3Dish window interface.
whine whine whine cussing etc…
I think a more constructive approch might be to explain without using subjective and unclear adjectives such as “Fuzzy” or “soft” and writing constructive critisizims using real data and deductive reasoning as opposed to FUD.
If there is one thing we all should know by now, it’s that we are not going to force Apple and Mr Jobs into submission.
If you could do that, there would be Os9 Dell/HP/Compaq’s using iX86 hardware with BeOS underpinings, being sold for $200 a pop and available only in very large beige metal Cases with 50 drive bays, 20 PCI slots, 15 RDRAM banks and ISA/Parralel/Serial/USB2/iLink/SDcardslots/MMcardslots/compactflash/PC MCIA and apple would only provide the software, and Appleworks would be dominant and Microsoft would be a small system integrator, and Linux would be still Linux, and we would all be Happy and The SEC would be investigating apple for Accounting “issues”, and John Ashcroft and Bush would be kissing up to Jobs who would be their Major Campaign contributors, etc etc.
But you know what.
None of this is happening and I’ve never gone back to OS9 since since OSX10.0.1 and my eyes are just fine and I cana develop PHP and test it in a true Unix environment in Apache using a MySQL database as well as make my Art using Photoshop/Painter/Illustrator/Livemotion/FinalCut/AfterEffects/ and use Macintax and Office and Quicken.
I know this is brand name calling, but you know what I can also use Gimp and most linux apps and they aren’t brand names.
I don’t know at this point most of the critisims that I hear is jsut whyning and the last solid article about os X that I read was about 6 months ago (Ars Technica’s review)
The reality is you just don’t have to use it.
” You are the weakest link. Goodbye!”
>>I can’t deal with antialiasing so I turn it always off (at least in M$ OSes, the more OSX-savvy should tell everyone else in the forum how to do it in OSX, if at all possible).<<
Apple Menu>
System Preferences…
Personal
General
If that is not good enough for you, just download Tinker Tool to add functionality to you appearance needs…
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool2.html
Enjoy
Point 1) Mac ppl generally know nothing about windows, hence claiming it dosent have AA until recently.
Point 2) Mac ppl generally know nothing about colours, if your getting wrong colour definition its cause of your monitor not your operating system (how u could not understand this is beyond me).. go into your display properties and reset your rgb graphs to be correct. Use a gamma utility to set that right, what your prob seeing is that macs have a different default gamma value (thats also wrong by the way.)
Point 3) If your a graphic designer then color definition matters to you and u WONT USE A LCD SCREEN because there color definition is known to be aweful compared to CRT. Nearly all macs now come with LCD’s… is this professional ? i think not.
Point 4) Altivec has limitations as does the memmory speed of macs.. hence a lot of programs that ARE altivec enabled still go faster on pc.
Point 5) How an operating system looks has little to do with its performance, any real professional cares about its useability not how perty it is. This is why windows XP dosent have its cleartype enabled by default cause of the tiny performance hit (way less than osx), so before comparing AA between osx and XP please go and turn it on. Windows ppl care about performance and useability, apple cares about how transparent your box is. And no i dont care my box is grey .. its under the table out of the way.. its just a computer, unlike all the MAC ppl i dont put it on the table to show it off. I have better things to do .. like use it.
It’s not about the ability to do anti-aliasing. It’s about anti-aliasing at 10pt – which is blurry and is unnecessary.
this must be aimed at me I assume…
>>Point 2) Mac ppl generally know nothing about colours, if your getting wrong colour definition its cause of your monitor not your operating system (how u could not understand this is beyond me).. go into your display properties and reset your rgb graphs to be correct. Use a gamma utility to set that right, what your prob seeing is that macs have a different default gamma value (thats also wrong by the way.)<<
Right and wrong… if the color doesn’t translate from one file format to another (including if the OS renders the colors correctly), then the color definition becomes corrupt. I don’t have all day to sit and tweak settings! The work I do goes from a Titanium PowerBook G4 (15′ flat screen LCD) to a bunch of Sun boxes being viewed by 17′ flat panel LCD displays (NEC) so Gamma is not an issue here!
>>Point 3) If your a graphic designer then color definition matters to you and u WONT USE A LCD SCREEN because there color definition is known to be aweful compared to CRT. Nearly all macs now come with LCD’s… is this professional ? i think not.<<
Agreed… I didn’t like the idea of Apple giving up on the CRT one bit. It didn’t make sense for people who do video and graphics and being CRT displays are suppose to be more politically correct from a viewers standpoint. Digital to Digital vs. Digital to Analog will be a problem of the past though!
>>Point 5) How an operating system looks has little to do with its performance, any real professional cares about its useability not how perty it is. This is why windows XP dosent have its cleartype enabled by default cause of the tiny performance hit (way less than osx), so before comparing AA between osx and XP please go and turn it on.<<
Well I don’t go showing off my Ti-Book, it just sits there on the console at work an people come up to it shower it with compliments (XP users included) and I say thanks an keeping plugging along!
>>Windows ppl care about performance and useability, apple cares about how transparent your box is. And no i dont care my box is grey .. its under the table out of the way.. its just a computer, unlike all the MAC ppl i dont put it on the table to show it off. I have better things to do .. like use it.<<
So do Mac ppl and that is exactly why I invested into a PowerBook in the first place, to get work done! And comparing my last six months to my workflow a year ago. I get a lot more work done because the system works for me and not the other way around!!!
’nuff said
CattBeMac
Man i wish more mac ppl were like u.
Cool,
Glenn