Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps

Xenex writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.1.5 a few days ago, Carbon applications now have access to Quartz anti-aliasing. However, we have to wait for developers to release updated versions of their applications to take advantage it. The people at Unsanity have decided that they didn't want to wait, and have released a 'haxie' called Silk. It forces Carbon applications to use the new Quartz anti-aliasing, and my experiences with it have all been perfect. So, now you can have a beautiful Snak, Mozilla, IE ... if it's Carbon, it's made pretty."

Comments

thanks, but...

[wizbit]

i don't see all-encompassing quartz anti-aliasing support as some sort of OSX holy grail. some applications look nice with antialiasing, others look downright ugly. it's nice that this hack lets you specify which programs you don't want it to apply antialiasing to, but i'd much rather it worked in reverse. allowing me to try out the look of an app with antialiasing would be useful in determining if it's feasible to keep it activated.

as it stands, there are a plethora of available apps built with ATSUI text rendering (understand that they take a significant speed hit in doing so), and more productivity apps are being updated daily. i LOVE chimera's option to disable "text smoothing" as it really does give credence to their claims that Apple needs to get on the ball with speeding up quartz antialiasing. and 10.1.5 DOES help this problem somewhat - i had downloaded an early (also hackish) version of Mozilla linked with ATSUI text rendering and it seemed much slower than my vanilla Mozilla install performed under this hack.

this is a very cool thing indeed, but antialiasing isn't the be-all end-all of the OS X user experience.

Re:Is anti-aliasing really so great?

[devonbowen]

I have also found that anti-aliased fonts are difficult to read. I think the reason is partly the "fuzziness" that you talk about. But the letters also look dimmer. Since the color is spread out over more pixels, there are fewer pixels that are actually solid black. Most pixels become some shade of grey and are harder for the eye to pick up. I am leaving it turned on for a while to see if I get used to it. But it's not a clear advantage.

Devon

Re:why would you want to?

[ZxCv]

Altogether, font anti-aliasing is really a niche feature that's best left off by default. Only a few applications really benefit from it--mostly graphic design and photo editing applications dealing with large fonts.

Personally, I prefer that it be on by default. Far more things than design and photo editing benefit from it--IE, namely. The text rendering in IE on OS X is just downright horrid compared to some of the other browsers available (Chimera, OmniWeb)--so much so that I had started to use IE less and less as Chimera matured, solely because Chimera looks so much better. After installing Silk, IE looks essentially just as good as Chimera. Now, until Chimera really advances in features and stability, I've got no reason to use it because the text in IE finally looks as good as the rest of OS X.