"Reaction [beta]"
The resolution-independent user interface 10 Jan 2007
"Oh, sweet resolution independence: you're almost upon us, and you go something like this: the pixel density of LCD displays is getting higher, while the physical screen sizes are largely the same. That means that, in the future, you'll probably have a good old 23" Cinema Display on your desk, but it'll pack a whole lot more pixels than it does today.
"Now, if you were to use today's Mac OS X on that display, everything would be really tiny, because a button can only be drawn at one, fixed size. More pixels, with fixed (72 DPI) controls, equals tiny town...
"A long term solution is needed, one that all OS developers are looking at: a user interface that can scale at will. A resolution independent interface, even. Have an Apple High-DPI MegaCinema Display? No problem. Just scale the user interface to twice its regular size. Every single button, title bar, piece of text and scroll widget draws itself at a new size. The result is silky smooth - beautiful buttons, beautifully clickable, and beautifully high-resolution. That's the idea, anyway. It just needs to, you know, be programmed."
(Pssst! Screenshots of Apple's top secret "user interface theme design tool" are also included within the patent filing.)
[via Daring Fireball]
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3 comments so far
Harry 10 Jan 2007 12:39 PM
From an interaction design perspective, it's a really big challenge to develop a UI that you can easily scale down from desktop to mobile devices (PDA, smart phone, etc.). After all, mobile devices are completely different, not just "the same but smaller". If someone nailed this, I'd be really impressed.
But scaling up a bit - from big desktop to even bigger desktop. This isn't such a big deal in terms of interaction design. It's basically just a question of "the same but a bit bigger".
Simon 10 Jan 2007 06:47 PM
@Harry: You make a good point - scaling down is much more difficult. However, it's interesting to see that Apple's new iPhone adopts "the same but smaller" approach that you refer to. Take a look at the way it displays web pages in Safari. It renders each in full at the outset - even though its small visual display makes reading impossible at this size - before allowing you to zoom in by touching areas of page that are of interest. It looks like this works quite well to me (although I'd need to use it to be sure). I'd be interested to know what you thought.
Harry 13 Jan 2007 01:38 PM
The two-fingers-to-zoom technique that's offered on the iPhone looks pretty cool. This idea has been knocking around for a while - apparently MIT Media Lab developed ideas like this in a project called "The Luminous Room", which then became the inspiration for the interactive wall Tom Cruise's character used in Minority Report.
An interesting possible sequence
- science inspiring art inspiring science?
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/underkoffler-0717.html