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Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps

Posted by pudge on from the mmm-pretty dept.

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."

1 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. thanks, but... by wizbit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.