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Aqua Enhancements

Posted by pudge on from the aqua-programming-for-smarties dept.

Marsee writes: "Mike Beam looks at two Aqua enhancements -- one seemingly frivolous and the other not: animated window resizing and drawers." O'Reilly's really invested in Mac OS X, and they often have nice articles for developers on a wide range of subjects in their Mac DevCenter.

3 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Windows by dthable · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It fits more into subitle usability features. The "drain" effect is basically the Window manager showing you where it wants to put the application. Is this necessary for the power user? Not really. Do newbies like it? Yes.

    I used to work at the university call center. You wouldn't believe the number of people who claimed that Windows lost the program they were working on. It turns out that they would hit the minimize button or some keystroke. Then the application would minimize without warning. By having Aqua show you where things went, you can find them without any knowldege of computers.

  2. Resolution Independance by Matthias+Wiesmann · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, using floating points is a very good thing for GUI stuff. While it might seem pointless for window sizes, all coordinates in Quartz are floating point. This makes it posible to work in a resolution independant way.

    Thinking of the screen as a discret grid is not the way to go if you want to handle anti-aliasing, sub-pixel text positioning, scaling for a screen with a different size/resolution, etc...

    Remember that Quartz is used for handling on screen drawing, but also printing -- current printers can have 24 times more resolution than your screen (2400 DPI vs 100)- so if you use the discrete grid of your screen to describe stuff for your printer, you can only adress directly one pixel out of 576.

  3. Publishers like O'Reilly by PrimeWaveZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think publishers like O"Reilly who dive head first into Mac OS X will be happy with the return on their investment. Look at Microsoft, who went great gonzos with their next Office version, which is Mac OS X only.

    Other, more lukewarm publishers won't sell as many products, and in turn say "See, we were right! OS X isn't as cool as you all thought."

    It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but O'Reilly has seemed to fulfill a good one for themselves, rather than a bad one. Bravo, I say!