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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.

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. 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.