
Pixel Perfect - olivercameron
http://daringfireball.net/2012/08/pixel_perfect
======
jcampbell1
I find it quite surprising that the author is so passionate about typefaces,
but serves his own blog in Verdana. Good thing it is not called
JaringJireJall.net [1]

That being said, I really think the days of sans fonts are close to over. 10
years from now, we will all be reading on 300 dpi screens and taste in
typography will return to being the dominate feature of design.

I can't wait until I can read the Economist online in the correct typeface. I
can walk down an airplane isle and recognize that font in less than a second.
The New Yorker also uses a font that seems to be unique. The Atlantic needs a
custom typeface.

I am so excited that high DPI screens are going to be the norm. The web design
world as we know it today is about shitty flourishing with artwork. 10 years
from now it will be about designing beautiful glyphs that represent the brand.

[1] J is particularly gross in Verdana.

~~~
jmduke
I'm interested in this. As someone who doesn't pay that much attention to
typography (beyond the obvious 'Papyrus is bad' stuff) what makes individual
typefaces preferable over a standard typeface for all similarly structured
content?

(Besides branding, that is.)

~~~
sbierwagen
It's pure marketing. There's no objective, measurable difference.

~~~
LoganCale
Yes there is. Certain typefaces are objectively easier to read than others,
and some work better for certain content than others. Some are best for body
text, some are best for headlines, etc. Some are optimized for low resolution
screens, some for print (and as such work well on high resolution screens).

~~~
delackner
A great recent example that appeared on HN was the typeface designed for road
signs, which the designers then put through Germany(?)'s test suite for
legibility at distance in various road conditions and determined the new font
was objectively legible at greater distance than all previous standard road-
sign fonts with which it was compared.

[By request, I found the original article:
[http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-
signag...](http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signage-
typeface/) ]

~~~
tsahyt
Do you happen to have the link to that? Must have missed that and I'd like to
read it.

~~~
delackner
[http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-
signag...](http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signage-
typeface/)

------
SCdF
So more pixels is great. Is it really _that_ great?

I feel like there are people who look at their devices and people who look at
what's displayed on their devices.

For me, text is text is text. I'm looking at it, not so I can enjoy how crisp
it is (or isn't), but so I can consume those words and get them inside my
head.

I find (I've played around with high DPI devices) that while they do look
nice, the niceness is quickly forgotten when I actually start using them for
something _other_ than looking at how nice they look. Likewise, going back to
use lower DPI devices you notice the difference, until you stop looking for it
and actually get work done.

I'm not saying that I don't care entirely, I just... I wouldn't go and buy a
new device solely because its resolution was higher. It will be nice when
these devices eventually make it to me, but I'm not really bothered either
way.

If we were to talk about recent revolutions in the home computer I'd rank
multi-core CPUs as a much more important change. No longer can one broken app
go on a rampage and block you out.

Anyway, tl;dr; it's great he's passionate about it, I just don't see it as
such as important thing.

~~~
msutherl
Some people make a point of appreciating the small joys of life. Others do
not. Much effort and attention is lost on the latter.

~~~
mcantelon
Some people focus on the substance rather than the style. Others do not. Much
effort and attention is lost on the latter.

~~~
pooriaazimi
I find myself a million times more "productive" in Sublime Text 2 with a
"light" theme (Soda Light) than previously when it had a dark theme (the
default one). I do look for substance, but we are all machines and can't fight
over our limitations. My eye thanks me when it can visually see an "orange"
function instead of having to look for a "black" (i.e. misspelled) fuction in
code. It's not my fault - eyes appreciate semantically color-coded (or
typeface-coded) blocks of code/article/etc ( _my last sentence is poorly
phrased, as a non-English it's hard to articulate what I want to say but I'm
sure you understand what I tried to say_ ).

------
kenjackson
I'm probably just blind, but I have trouble seeing the difference in display
quality based on resolution. And I don't think I'm alone.

When I was at the Apple Store after they launched the new iPad, there were
several people who confused the iPad 2 for the new iPad. And even after being
shown they were looking at the wrong one didn't go, "Oh... this one looks much
better!", rather I heard from multiple people a line like, "Oh, what's the
difference?"

I've looked at the HTC Titan side by side with an HTC Rezound (one of the
lowest PPI versus probably the highest PPI phones) and it's really hard to
tell the difference unless you're really looking hard. I think in part because
even the worst PPI on phones is actually quite good.

I haven't seen the retina display on the Mac Book Retina Display, but I do
hope that it lives up to the hype, as I was sorely disappointed by how
incremental the iPad retina display was (versus the iPad 2).

(Note, the iPhone jump to Retina Display was a visibly dramatic improvement.)

~~~
danbee
Your eye sight must be terrible. The retina iPad is a _vast_ improvement over
the iPad 2 for me.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Note that the whole point of the "retina" branding is that at a _certain
distance_ you will no longer see any improvement as you move further back. If
those people were standing sufficiently far back (as you might when looking at
a store display iPad) then the retina effect will kick in.

------
kilowatt
I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it.
But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when
scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-
inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a
strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?),
but it's something you have to see and feel to judge the impact on your
overall experience, IMO.

Lion inverted trackpad scrolling so that when you drag your two fingers down,
the content follows them, like there is a physical connection between your
hand and the page. On the Retina MBP, that illusion was mostly lost for me.
I'm actually curious to know if owners of the Retina display get used to this
chugginess, or if it's still kind of a big deal, even after awhile.

I know only a little bit about hardware composition in WebKit—and webpages are
definitely not assembled "entirely" on the GPU. I suspect that there are gains
to be made there, just in terms of how much work is being offloaded. Even if
desktop Safari were to do what my old iPhone 3GS would do—separate the thread
handling scrolling from the thread doing the painting, so that you could
actually scroll ahead of where the renderer had filled in content, and see a
checkerboard pattern—might be a better feeling alternative. Then again, this
could already be happening. I haven't kept up with WebKit changes. Credit to
Apple for pushing the boundaries. But I want my buttery smooth page renders,
damnit.

/end entitled whining

~~~
czr80
Was it running Lion or ML? I recall some reviews mentioning that ML had
specific optimisations to improve scrolling performance.

~~~
kilowatt
It was Lion. I'll revisit my impressions. It'd be nice to collect some hard
data too...

------
gavanwoolery
Unfortunately, a laptop is still a laptop. Small keyboard, inferior mouse (or
lack thereof), single display, performance constrained by battery life. The
performance margins are getting slimmer, but for a little over the price of
the high end MacBook Pro (about $3000 with tax), I could build you a 64-core
AMD G34 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, that would utterly destroy the Macbook
performance-wise. Obviously, to each their own. I don't think the author is
protein-folding or raytraycing, so this computer probably suits his needs
better. Alternately, I could build a six-screen Beowulf cluster using 6 Nexus
7 tablets for $1200 (Tegra 3 performance is getting close to Core-Duo
performance).

~~~
epsylon
> for a little over the price of the high end MacBook Pro (about $3000 with
> tax), I could build you a 64-core AMD G34 with 64 gigabytes of RAM

Can you detail how you would achieve that ? 3000 $ seems insanely low to me.

~~~
gavanwoolery
<http://i.imgur.com/Gy9GU.png>

Just priced it out on Newegg.com (see screenshot above) -- does not include
shipping, power supply, etc...but gives you a general idea of the price range
-- overall, you could probably do it for around $3.5k-$4k, or easily 3k if you
dropped 2 processors, which would still be a beast of a machine...

------
jmitcheson
It's a shame Google Chrome still doesn't render CSS3 fonts correctly on
Windows. The strangest thing about it is that they barely even seem to
acknowledge that it's an issue.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-
renderin...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-rendering-of-
font-face-in-chrome)

If you've noticed that web fonts look terrible on Windows / Chrome, please
star these issues!

<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692>
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91899>
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102371>

~~~
elktea
The keyword you're looking for is 'DirectWrite'. Here's a post from January
this year indicating they're working on it:
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-
dev/...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-
dev/5BQYLaalCoY/LiVE-A9RZpoJ)

------
FrankBooth
_Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-
end desktop._

Compared to a high-end desktop which has barely seen updates since 2010, and
includes a GPU released in 2009, sure.

~~~
harpastum
The point being made was that it is a desktop- _class_ machine. Generally,
laptops have always been convenience and portability, and desktops have had
power and price point.

Obviously there are exceptions to any rule, but in this case, the display is
actually _better_ than any desktop I've seen, and the SSD and CPU/GPU give it
all the power necessary for 95% of users. The price point is definitely high,
but otherwise it seems best of both worlds.

~~~
lmm
You've always been able to get a laptop that was as good as the desktops of
2-3 years ago, and never one that's as good as the current ones. Saying
"desktop-class" is a nonsense; this is no different from previous efforts.

Now, if you're saying we've reached the point where the extra CPU etc. of a
desktop are not worth it for most users, then I agree with you. But again
that's nothing specific to the macbook air; any modern laptop will have the
same properties.

------
reitzensteinm
> Think about that: a laptop with no performance tradeoff compared to a high-
> end desktop.

It helps if that high end desktop hasn't been updated in _two years_.

For CPU performance, laptops lagging a couple of years behind desktops is more
or less business as usual.

~~~
lloeki
Still, we're talking about a Xeon here, not your typical desktop-variant Core
Something. It was a powerhouse.

~~~
reitzensteinm
The benchmarks were lightly threaded, for which Xeons basically offer no
advantage - they let you have more cores in a machine, and that's about all.
For rendering and encoding, the 12 core 2010 Mac Pros would still _slaughter_
a retina MBP. No competition.

There are many impressive things about the retina MBP, but CPU performance is
not one of them.

~~~
Synaesthesia
I would say the CPU performance is very impressive, sure a 12 core will beat
it at rendering, but the single threaded performance is amazing, and the super
fast SSD makes it basically the fastest Mac ever in general usage.

------
mcmire
I kind of had the same thought too, as I walked through the Apple Store today
and took a gander at some of the Retina MBP's. I thought: in as soon as 5
years, people are going to look at the pre-Retina MBP's and wonder, how did we
ever live with 160 DPI displays? All of these jaggedies, this unsharp text,
these blurry textures in iCal -- all this ugliness that you have to squint
your eyes to see. Who would want that?

And for a moment I regretted I'd gotten an Air instead of a rMBP. But then I
realized... what I have is good enough. It is. It's great. And there will be
better products to come. And I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

But it is interesting to think about a future world where pixels are
antiquities, merely "remember when's".

------
andrewfelix
One thing that I've noticed as pixel density is increasing, is many 3rd party
UI elements _aren't_ increasing in size relative to monitor improvements. I
remember using Photoshop on my old LC475 in the 90's and not having to squint
and hold the mouse steady to select the tool I wanted.

Please tell me someone else has noticed this? Or am I just getting old.

~~~
cshesse
Monitor pixel densities haven't increased that much, they've been limited by
having to keep interface elements visible. It's only easy for apple because
they just doubled the density in both directions. Any intermediate numbers of
pixels would have impacted usability.

------
evoxed
So, here's a question for those who actually have one of these mega-res
displays... how's the terminal? Or any other typically aliased text? Secondly,
how well does it work in a dual/2+ boot situation? Obviously other systems
have the drivers for such large displays, but without knowing how to scale
it... Is there any way to set the hardware to simply enlarge everything x2 in
the absence of serious display drivers (for example, a desktopless linux or
bsd)?

~~~
nilium
re: A terminal: probably fine, albeit small. Running at 2880x1800 without any
scaling isn't terrible, but it would quickly drive your eyes to escape your
skull. I can't say for sure what would happen under Linux given only a
terminal, but I imagine things would be pretty small until you got it using a
different resolution than the native resolution.

Terminal emulators are fine, but I assumed you meant the other kind. Terminal
emulators look great, as does every text editor I've used (MacVim, vim in a
terminal emulator, Sublime Text 2, TextMate 2, Xcode [looks great, but it's
unfortunately still a lousy IDE], etc.).

re: Dual boot, also fine in my case, though I only keep Mac OS and Windows 7
installed right now. Windows 7 in particular is an issue, as DPI scaling only
affects some programs (so where on Mac OS you'd get pixel-doubled views or
text, on Windows you get windows that aren't scaled at all, such as Chrome).
If you have dual monitors, Windows is particularly painful, as DPI scaling is
system-wide rather than per-screen. I haven't tested Windows 8 and likely
won't until after it's been released.

The best route I've found is to simply set the display to 1920x1200 or lower
and scale it up on Windows. Windows 7 just doesn't handle high resolution
stuff particularly well -- it's not bad, but things just aren't all there. I
expect Windows 8 will be better.

I couldn't say what your options are on a desktopless Linux/BSD system, but I
would imagine that there's something you could do, even if that something is
just using a larger font.

------
cmelbye
I totally agree about the Lucida Grande thing. It's weird seeing fonts like
Lucida Grande and Verdana on such a nice display.

~~~
Xcelerate
The Retina MPB has opened up a whole world of fonts. It's amazing how much
attention I pay to them when I visit websites now.

There is a downside to such a nice screen -- it makes me painfully OCD. On my
previous laptop, the screen was such crap that it didn't bother me. On this
one, I notice every subtle flaw.

For instance, image retention (which I'm now convinced that after swapping
three of these things out eventually affects all of the LG panels used in the
MBPR [Samsung panels do not seem to have the issue]).

Then there's the fact that it's just slightly not bright enough for my liking.
I find myself hitting the brighten button a lot when it is at max. No matter
that my old laptop looks downright dim next to this.

And despite the fact that it is an IPS display, the colors do change quite a
bit with viewing angle. A solid white screen kind of shimmers in luminance and
tint when moving my head.

And the black level isn't pure black.

And 220ppi isn't _quite_ enough to complete the no-pixel illusion for me.

And the color gamut could be a smidge greater.

It's like the uncanny valley of screens. It's so close to perfect, but not
quite there, that it leaves me paying a weird amount of attention to it.

But I wouldn't trade it for any other.

------
msutherl
I've recently been studying typography and it's been really heartbreaking to
realize that what differentiates a good and a bad typeface onscreen is how it
well it renders. Plenty of great typefaces are just unusable. Most fonts
distort wildly as you step up/down in pixel size. I didn't start in print
design, but man is web design primitive in comparison!

~~~
evoxed
I have to admit that rage was starting to burn inside of me until I read your
last sentence– that's one of the reasons why I take so few jobs for the web
these days. I always thought that web technologies would far surpass what we
could do in print (which, as a lead type junkie, sounded pretty amazing) and
then I grew up, started dealing with W3C &c;– now here we are, only in the
last two years or so getting a _reliable_ (and compliant) way of using more
than just Times, Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, &c... It's slow, slow progress but
it's great to see that while those issues are hashing themselves out that the
pixel problem is practically resolved. (Though I should note that pixels or
not, setting a spread to be displayed digitally was never that much of a
problem if it didn't have to be displayed in the browser. Sure, some fonts
have shitty hinting but the ball is at least in your court.)

------
timthorn
> Dots were how computers rendered everything: pixels on screen, dots of
> ink/toner on paper

The writer seems to ignore the world of X-Y plotters and vector graphics
workstations, which have been around since the very early days of computing.

------
cageface
Color me surprised to read another frothing fluff piece for an Apple product
from arch-apparatchik Gruber.

Doubling the display density of a laptop screen qualifies Apple for the Nobel
Peace prize now, or something.

~~~
pooriaazimi
I'm not sure what your critique is. He's not a politician or TV host _getting
paid_ by the bad Apple to write/say nice lies about them... He writes about
Apple, and people visit his website to read what he writes. It's that simple.

If you disagree with any of his points, please post them in this topic. But
don't go dismissing it just because it's from _arch-apparatchik Gruber_.

~~~
cageface
As he himself has written on his blog, in exchange for this kind of PR he gets
invited to private meetings inside Apple.

~~~
arrrg
Does he? What are you referring to? The Mountain Lion presentation? Apple
invited loads of journalists to that, they just also included Gruber there.

~~~
cageface
<http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion>

_And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just
me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing
and Bill Evans from PR._

~~~
arrrg
Sure. And? What’s your point? Apple met separately with loads of journalists.
I don’t see anything special about how they treated Gruber.

~~~
cageface
Yeah you're right. An exclusive, face-to-face meeting with the senior vice
president of marketing is nothing special. I'm sure things like that don't
influence his writing about Apple at all.

~~~
pazimzadeh
That meeting happened in 2012. Gruber's been writing Daring Fireball since
2002. <http://daringfireball.net/archive/>

~~~
cageface
I've been reading him on and off the whole time. Once upon a time he was
actually worth reading but I don't even bother now because I can practically
write his tech-Pravda pieces in my head.

------
dfischer
My 2009 MacBook pro just died and I'm debating which Mbp to get. I'm leaning
on the non-retina display because of the reports of FPS sluggishness. I'm very
aware of frame rates.

Also, I keep hearing programs like photoshop and so on aren't optimized for
retina yet. As much as I'd like to be bleeding edge, and even help develop for
it... I can't help but feel it's at least another year before its more viable
to go retina.

I don't want FPS lag. I'm probably going to pick up the 1,700 model and add
3rd party ssd + 16gb ram.

------
Aldor
I bought a new MacBook Pro during WWDC this year. I had the option to get the
RMBP, but I didn't, and I don't regret my decision. The performance vs. cost
ratio of this laptop is significantly higher (plus I get a disc drive), and
honestly with the high-res screen, I have to be a lot closer than my normal
viewing distance to notice a difference between this and the RMBP.

Only thing I think I think I'll regret in the future is not getting an SSD. Oh
well. I like my storage space more than my speed.

~~~
dfischer
Since you got a non retina MBP you can upgrade your storage to a SSD and at a
discount.

------
twodayslate
I found this to be true with my phone. I currently have an iPhone 4 and I want
to switch soon. However, looking at the other phone screens hurts my eyes. The
image seems blurry.

------
stinnyfregs
Gruber's full of shit. I had a 1600x1200 17" monitor in the 90s. LCDs were a
step back in pixel density, and retina means they're JUST NOW catching up to
where I was 15 years ago.

~~~
frou_dh
That's incorrect. MBPs were available with better density than your figure
starting 5 years ago (1920x1200 @ 17"). I have one from 2009 and it continues
to be a joy.

~~~
stinnyfregs
You still to this day can't buy a 17" 1080p monitor. LCDs are still behind my
15-year-old CRT.

~~~
accountoftheday
my old T61p's 1920x1200 15.4" panel disagrees.

