On Sep 10, 2012, at 1:29 AM, Jean Suisse < email@hidden> wrote: Hi,
I agree with you. On principle.
But H. Miersch never hinted that he didn't knew what resolution independence meant.
I thought he rather strongly (if not explicitly) did hint exactly that. He said:
On Sep 9, 2012, at 8:54 AM, H Miersch <email@hidden> wrote:
I recently switched to a new macbook pro which has a higher resolution (in therms of dpi) than my previous system, and now the problem is the font sizes that Xcode uses in some parts of the window. that text is so small that it becomes hard to read. i know how to make the font in the console and the source editor bigger, but what about the other stuff? how can i, for example, increase the font size in the navigator? i couldn't find anything in the preferences...
That is, he blames the higher resolution of his new computer as being the reason for text being now too small. That's a common symptom of users who, when setting up a new computer, bump their screen resolution to match their new, higher pixel density.
Leo Laporte railed on his podcasts for weeks about Apple not letting him set the resolution on his new Retina Display Macbook Pro to the full 2880x1800 that it was capable of. "I paid for the resolution, but Apple won't let me get it," he kept ranting. And then another week ranting that the text was so small as to be unreadable once he finally learned the hack that let him do that. He did finally and grudgingly accept that the display looked pretty good when he set it to the default resolution. I don't know if he ever truly understood why, although he does sometimes mutter about "dots vs. pixels", whatever a "dot" is if not a pixel.
Programmers understand resolution independence, at least from the inside. Apple has been telling us since 2002 how to write our applications to make use of it. But we're also users, and sometimes even we programmers don't make the connection between what resolution independence means from inside the computer, and what it means from outside.
What it means from outside is that a 13" screen should always be close to 800x500, and a 15" screen should always be close to 1024x640 (both assuming a 16:10 aspect ratio), REGARDLESS of how many pixels you have!!! You have 13" or 15", and that's how many normal-sized Pixels there are on that size screen.
Just because a 15" Retina will let you set screen size to 1920x1200 doesn't mean you should. You'd get 151 points per inch, or about 12.5 lines per inch of 12-point text. It's gonna be tiny! 9-point text is gonna be tinier! Everything will be less than half its natural size.
It's a matter of personal taste, of course. 1024x640 on a 15" screen is actually 80 pixels per inch, but the crisper image on a Retinal display will help you read it. If you have good eyesight and/or strong glasses, go ahead and crank the pixel count up, but don't crank it beyond what you can see comfortably and then complain that you can't see it comfortably.
This is not a fault of Xcode. It's a fault of the user not realizing that higher pixel density should not be matched by a higher point density. The user can correct the "text is too tiny" problem across the board, throughout Xcode and throughout all other apps in one fell swoop, by the simple expedient of setting screen size to something more reasonable.
I will confess that I misread "I know how to make the font in console ... bigger" as referring to Console.app, not Xcode's console pane. That led me to think he was trying to correct the problem one application at a time, and only posted here when he got to Xcode and couldn't figure out how to do it here. That's why I read his problem as being system-wide and not actually an Xcode-specific problem.
-Ron Hunsinger
|