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Mac OS X 10.1.5 Update Available
krugdm writes "The Mac OS X 10.1.5 update which was hinted at in the MS Office update changelog is now available through Software Update. From the updater: 'Update 10.1.5 delivers enhancements which improve the reliability of Mac OS X applications, delivers improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support.'"
Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.
All powerbook users that use DoubleCommand to turn the useless second enter key into another beware ! 10.1.5 crashes at boot time due to DoubleCommand.
Delete the folder in your Library/Startup Items folder !!
blaah !
At the risk of perpetuating advertising for Unsanity... today I received this email from Unsanity (I use several of their "haxies"):
.
Dear friends,
When we saw MacOS X 10.1.5 out this morning, we got all excited about the ability of Carbon applications to use the native Quartz text rendering for ultra-smooth, antialiased text display. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, every Carbon application needs to be updated
"That's not fair" - we thought, so we sat down and wrote a small freeware haxie, called Silk (smooth as silk, get the feeling?). Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 for all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and many others. And if it doesn't look right in some application, you can add it to the Exclude list to get it to the way it looked before.
So, grab it now:
http://download.unsanity.com/silk-10.sit
More information and some pretty screenshots:
http://www.haxies.com/silk/
Thank you for your support and participation!
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
There are about 3 ways to do anti-aliasing:
The very expensive way is to examine the actual paths you are rendering, how they intersect the pixels, and calculating the actual coverage of the pixels directly with math. This is probably what the original poster meant by "floating point". This is easy for infinitely long straight lines but very difficult for any other shape to do correctly.
A less expensive way is subpixel sampling, which is to use the normal black & white algorithim to render the letter about 4 times larger and then use 16 pixels (or sometimes weighted overlapping areas for better quality) to calculate the resulting gray from how many pixels are filled in. This can be done by hardware today and I believe is what is used by Quartz, the older Mac AntiAliasing, the new Windows AntiAliasing, and by Xrender for AntiAliasing. Note that some algorithims do the summation at the same time they calculate the subpixels, so there never is any "high resolution bitmap" in memory, but this does not change the basic algorithim.
The third way is to render at normal size and guess by looking at adjacent pixels. This is what Windows "Font Smoothing" did, I believe. A variation on it (producing shapes rather than grayscales) was used by early Macintoshes to render bitmaps onto higher-resolution printers. The primary advantage of this scheme is that it is fast, but otherwise it sucks.
ClearType is subpixel sampling with some multliple of 3 horizontally (not necessaryilly 1x3 as many people think, doing a higher resolution would result in better antialaiasing). These samples are then weighted-summed down to an image with 3 "subpixels" horizontally and one vertically. This is followed by a step I call "error diffusion" which is the clever part, to change the image by adding or subtracting some subpixels so the total amount or red, green, and blue are equal.
Okay, everybody, got it? "subpixel sampling" was used before Bill Gates first saw a computer, incidentally. It is NOT a MicroSoft invention, so stop making fools of yourselves.