[X4U] Slightly Off Topic Question - Screen Resolution

[Stroller]

On Sep 11, 2005, at 7:51 pm, eleventhvolume wrote:
> ... I've also just been issued with a fairly
> high-end Dell portable behemoth with a screen resolution of something 
> like
> 1920 x 1200 (I can't remember the exact dimensions, but it's a Dell
> Precision with the high spec).
>
> ... the screen makes everything - particularly web pages -
> look tiny, to which he took great exception. I think he's blessed with
> better eyesight than me, but he also owns the 17" Powerbook which has a
> somewhat lower resolution than the Dell. I commented that I believed 
> that
> the lower Apple resolution was an active design decision rather than 
> being
> anything to do with money-saving....

It may be an active design decision on Apple's part, but perhaps based 
on the fact that you can change the size of the font & window details 
on a Mac?

The 1920 x 1200 on your Dell is likely much more usable for a wider 
variety of people than a 1440 x 900 (as fitted to the current 17" 
Powerbook) would be - if you find the text too small you can increase 
its size. You should be doing this not by reducing the resolution 
(which, as you discovered causes pixillation) by by increasing the font 
size by % in the Advanced button of the right-most tab of display 
properties or by changing the font size in Themes (you may need again 
to click an Advanced button to do this). Font-smoothing will be correct 
for the original screensize.

Between Windows 95 & 2000 it was quite easy to increase the font size 
only of the titlebar, desktop icon label or File/Edit Menu but now in 
XP it takes a little more twiddling; it IS however quite possible to 
have both a very high resolution & quite large fonts, icons & buttons.

Although the defaults on the Mac might be more suitable for the large 
variety of people, the GUI is certainly less flexible in this respect. 
Although I love the combination of eye-candy & usability on my Mac, the 
way it's easy to navigate, this is the sort of thing that I miss about 
Windows.

Stroller.