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Leopard one-ups Vista

home.mchsi.com — Not to be outdone by Vista and its 256x256 icons. Apple has decided that Leopard will use 512x512 icons, just to one-up Microsoft. Not only that but the entire...

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  • dantidote, on 10/12/2007, -152/+35HUGE
    • flag564, on 10/12/2007, -57/+262As if a persons choice in OS is going to come down to big icons.

      Get a life.
    • danjal, on 10/12/2007, -73/+26this fight is soo petty hit hurts...
    • Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -25/+50The general appearance and practical resolution of icons in an OS might influence my choice, but I really can't see a single reason for icons larger than 128x128. 256x256 is overkill but may become usefull if we see a spike in DPI before Vista + 1, but there is no way anyone will nee 512x512 before Leopard + 1.

      Yes, they're pretty and all, but really not very usefull as icons.
    • vbsurfer, on 10/12/2007, -77/+112Im getting Leopard only because of this. Very informative article too.
    • naio21, on 10/12/2007, -73/+27You were sarcastic, right?
    • mpancha, on 10/12/2007, -57/+121rather than focus efforts on fixing the finder over the last several years, they decided 512x512 icons is more important.

      Good thing Apple has its priorities straight.... things like this make me regret being a Mac user
    • pumacub, on 10/12/2007, -59/+138Except that Vista's icons are vector based, which means they can be scaled to _any_ size. The 256x256 is a coded limit because anything bigger would just be stupid. I'm sure you can flip a registry switch and get the icons as big as you want.
    • Wooism, on 10/12/2007, -12/+109Alright, this is just stupid. #1 this is inaccurate, Apple has released no evidence they are making 512x512 icons. Yes they paid a firm to make them that way, but that does not mean the end product will be that or be in the OS.

      Also Apple has not stated the OS will be resolution independent, this is just speculation right now!

      I'm a huge mac fan, but even I don't want to hear this theoretical crap spewed as if it were factual by some idiot that runs a web-log. It's morons like him that keep it so there will never be real journalistic integrity to blogging.
    • gcnaddict, on 10/12/2007, -22/+89"Except that Vista's icons are vector based, which means they can be scaled to _any_ size. The 256x256 is a coded limit because anything bigger would just be stupid. I'm sure you can flip a registry switch and get the icons as big as you want."

      Who the ***** told you that? There _will_ _be_ _no_ _vectorization_ in Windows Vista besides the apps build around WPF (part of .net 3.0). Nothing else, including icons, will be vectorized. Want proof? There's a whole reservoir of icons in Vista's imageres.dll
    • panique, on 10/12/2007, -45/+81Inaccurate title. Should be "Leopard four-ups Vista".
    • ani-pockdotnet, on 10/12/2007, -36/+34Remember, as our screen resolutions continue to rapidly increase, one would be smart to make the minimum icon size larger so that the end user would have the OPTION of increasing the icon size up to 512px. The default icon size would be much much lower of course for today.

      For me and you in the current day and time, we may not appreciate this change, but there are those who have difficulty viewing objects on their screen, and this small change will make a big difference for them. At least they have the OPTION to scale larger.

      But again, IMO, this is for the future. Remember what a very smart man said once:

      "Nobody will ever need more than 640KB RAM." - Bill Gates
    • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -22/+13"there will never be real journalistic integrity to blogging"

      was there ever any to begin with? :P
    • chimona, on 10/12/2007, -18/+11@immortallobster,

      No, you moron. That's what he's saying. But idiots like the guy who wrote this story are what is going to keep the weblog from becoming a legit format.
    • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -16/+8Doesn't having icons this big kind of defeat the purpose of the icon (small thumbnail representation of an object) in the first place?!?!
    • wicketr, on 10/12/2007, -21/+12HUGE...LY OVERATED
    • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -14/+7@ chimona

      Oh god, I must have done something wrong, either I was sarcastic and some people are jsut to serious to take it as such, or I insulted a blogger

      or both ;)

      oh god no, now I must burn in hell! nooeeees!!!
    • gnomon, on 10/12/2007, -19/+14@ani-pockdotnet
      How very insightful of you. Oh, wait: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
    • cronot, on 10/12/2007, -16/+46@ani-pockdotnet:
      -- "Nobody will ever need more than 640KB RAM." - Bill Gates --

      Not to take Microsoft's side (I'm more on Linux camp), but you realize this is an urban legend, right? Bill never said that.
    • twtmc, on 10/12/2007, -21/+7The OS's are becoming WAY too focused on graphics and not putting enough time, effort, and resources into fixing the programming (and in apples case, hardware) problems that they have. Something tells me that the macbook explosion problems never would have happened if apple put as much effort into preventing their things from exploding as they have into making their icons look pretty. And I also don't think Vista Beta 2 would have crashed so much and would have been much more stable if microsoft hadn't have been spending so much time on their freaking useless glass.
    • gcnaddict, on 10/12/2007, -12/+13"And I also don't think Vista Beta 2 would have crashed so much and would have been much more stable if microsoft hadn't have been spending so much time on their freaking useless glass."

      You don't know the point behind glass do you? The whole point of 3D accelerated windows is to prevent the kind of screw ups we'd see when GDI would stop PAINTing windows. That's where glass came from.

      Oh and by the way, beta 2 did crash often, but that's because it was a beta. Try the pre-RC1 build (5536). It doesn't crash nearly as often. In fact, it runs well enough for me to call it my primary OS now.
    • mikeplokta, on 10/12/2007, -5/+26@Mejogid

      If your screen in the future has 600dpi resolution, then a 256x256 icon will be less than half an inch across, which you might find a bit small. No one needs 512x512 icons on current display equipment, but there's no harm in future-proofing the OS.
    • h2d2, on 10/12/2007, -21/+7Yep huge.

      Now when Dave Chappelle is jackin' off while watching pr0n on his Mac, he can also view his icons in 512x512.

      Way to increase your 3% marketshare.
    • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -8/+7@ gcnaddict

      Having used both Vista Beta 2, and using Pre-RC1 right now, Im curious what the specs on your rig were/are, Vista Beta 2 only BSODed on me once since may, that was due to creatives beautiful X-Fi support, and explorer only restarted once or twice, i felt for a beta it was rather stable. Pre-RC1 I agree, is stable as a rock, Ive tried to crash the thing, she wont go. I might even be able to lower the voltage on my chip a little, see if it still goes stable.
    • omatsei, on 10/12/2007, -16/+13Vista WILL be vector-based. The graphical subsystem is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is vector-based... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation
    • trigger0219, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4HUGE...

      is that a FUCCILLO reference? cuz thats only upstate NY, i laughed if it was (you score points :) )
    • drakethegreat, on 10/12/2007, -16/+5Wow as smart as the digg world is, it often is a victim of its own idiocy. Do you guys remember a certain comment from Bill Gates? It involves the amount of memory you need. 64k seemed like a lot. So we are gonna follow the microsoft band camp and believe that 256x256 is the biggest icons we will ever need? 512x512 is overkill RIGHT NOW but then again in XP aren't the background images really small because most everyone was running a resolution of 800x600. So look at how big resolutions have got on monitors over the past 6-7 years since the release of XP. Apple is thinking ahead because they already sell monitors with high resolutions. Right now you can't scale your monitor's resolution that high because icons look like crap at high res, you ever can't see them or they become pixelated. Believe it or not I would rather be prepared and called the company of overkill then the one that constantly shorts itself.
    • Bamborzled, on 10/12/2007, -7/+5@omatsei
      We know that. WPF will have vectorization. The rest of Windows WILL NOT.
    • mastahlee, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2Its gonna be HUUUUUUUUUUUGE!
    • igotdugout, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Compare the sizes you have available for wallpapers and you'll notice that at 512x512, they'll pretty much take over the screen. Besides I bet in the near future, before anyone has 600dpi monitors, we'll have Windows Aurora, or MAC Kangaroos.
    • Niten, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@Wooism

      Yes, Leopard _will_ have a vector-based UI:
      http://www.aeroxp.org/board/index.php?showtopic=5209
    • noeljohnhoward, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5um,
      to a bunch of people up there who stated that this is a waste of time, and saying, "instead of fixing finder for the new release, they made bigger icons!"

      i doubt this is all they are doing to the operating system. Its pretty obvious,

      And this is in no way official. sheesh.
    • PsychoPNut, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I agree with flag564, I'm not going to switch to Mac, but you gotta admit, its pretty nice looking...
    • championchap, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3i like that everyone is whining about them spending too much time making new shiney icons!
      haha, you really think they remade them?

      they opened illustrator, scaled them up.. done.
      notice that the icons are vector images saved for the web?
      yeah.. that would have taken all of 5 mins to do.
      just calm down.
    • digitaldivider, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3shameless spam: ***** APPLE UP THE ASS. buried as retarded. like steve jobs and ipods.
    • drobati, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@twtmc

      Dude, its SONY who caused the explosions not apple. Apple only used Sony's defective batteries. Which included other PC manufactures who used them for there laptops. Like Dell.

      I don't see why everyone is freaking the ***** out about these icon sizes. Its not like it takes a lot of TIME to code 512 into the OS X operating system. I bet you anything apple isn't putting there complete focus into icons you douche.
  • maninblac1, on 10/12/2007, -39/+9If you need icons that big, you're too blind, and if you're that blind, it doesn't really matter how good they look.
    • embraceware, on 10/12/2007, -24/+20Dude - think higher resolution than you have now, and think visual accessibility. Most software developers already have icons designed at 512x512 for printing purposes.
    • vinbob, on 10/12/2007, -8/+25This is lame.
      Sorry to be the linux zealot here peeps but the Linux GNOME desktop did away with raster icons a while ago. Quicker to load, they use less memory and they look sharper at any size too.

      I'd be surprised if Leopard or Vista will be using raster icons, this article just sounds misinformed
    • JorgeGT, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Size doesn't matter !!
  • CLucas916, on 10/12/2007, -52/+12the level of detail is almost orgasmic...
    • Sippi, on 10/12/2007, -8/+44here is a towel for you...
    • naio21, on 10/12/2007, -23/+2I really prefer chicks help to "getting orgasmatic"...
    • tzmguitarist, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10Or if you saw the Weeds speech in the video section...

      Here's a banana.
  • Cannon13, on 10/12/2007, -21/+2Wait, why is there an icon for Expose? And has Apple officially announced a resolution independent GUI?
  • newbill123, on 10/12/2007, -13/+8The Expose icon allows you to invoke it in any sort of app launcher (such as the dock or a finder sidebar or a third party app) just like you pressed the key on the keyboard.

    The large icons are something Apple has been asking Developers to do for a couple of  years when eyecandy became such a big deal. Whether it's for Universal Access or looking good in high resolution screen shots for the press, Apple has been pushing to at least be ready for this for a while.
  • stonr, on 10/12/2007, -40/+6Mac boys need bigger icons because of the huge amounts of porn they can display in regards to their pc counter parts; consequently, they became so blind that the icons need to be 1/3 the screen of their 30" screens
  • waalter, on 10/12/2007, -11/+22Resolution independent GUIs are going to make it so much easier for books and magazines to feature screenshots from computers. Many publications print at 300ppi, and scaling a standard 72ppi screenshot up to 300ppi looks awful.
    • Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -28/+2Each dot in a 300 DPI magazine consist of a red, green and blue point that can be either on or off. Each sub-pixel on a computer screen can have a value from 1-256. Any decent alogarithm can make a 75 dpi screenshot look fine at the relatively low magazine resolutions.
    • imnotquitesure, on 10/12/2007, -2/+26Have you ever done prepress work? or even worked with photos?
      Magazines are printed in CMYK, not RGB.
    • tzmguitarist, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15Magazines are not printed with RGB dots that can be turned on and off. They are printed with inks (4, actually - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) of varying density which, when overlapped, give the eye the sense of contiguous color.

      What screen has 75dpi? Isn't it 72?
    • zybch, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4When did 72dpi become the res of ANY and ALL screens??
      Am I seriously supposed to believe that a 17" LCD at 1024x768 (yes, the do exist) is the same dpi as a 17" at 1280x1024?
      This isn't a dig at you tzmguitarist, but at whoever started propogating this crap years and years ago.
    • Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Screens are 72 dpi? Hmm, one of my laptops is ~150 DPI, the other ~264 DPI.

      One laptop is 1280 x 768, and a 10" diagonal. So, sqrt(1280^2+768^2) = 1492 pixels on the 10" diagonal = ~150 DPI.

      The other is the Sony UX180P handheld, with 4.5" screen and 1024x600 screen size. So, sqrt(1024^2+600^2)/4.5 = ~264 DPI.

      As you noted, laser printers used to be only 300 DPI, in B/W. The Sony VAIO UX180P is 1024 COLOR pixels, or 3024 color segments (R,G,B) on the horizontal resolution (this is the extra resolution tapped by ClearType™ sub-pixel font rendering). ClearType on this handheld looks like laser print.

      Whether you consider this 264 DPI or 695 DPI, hi-res icons don't seem far-fetched to me.
    • Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sorry, ran out of edit time. That's 3072 color segments on the horizontal size, or sqrt((3 072^2) + (600^2)) / 4.5 = a sub-pixel 695 DPI as used by ClearType.

  • wisedude, on 10/12/2007, -73/+4I HATE MAC OSX, but I gotta admit those icons are sexy ;)
  • pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -11/+28How does this article confirm a resolution independent UI?
    • sovok, on 10/12/2007, -8/+7Mostly by showing screenshots of the resolution independent UI right out of the Leopard beta :>
    • Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10I think the vector (ie. scalable) UI screenshot does so more than the icons - it means that the UI can scale to any size, to look good at any DPI.
  • bsolidgold, on 10/12/2007, -27/+42Who cares? They're ICONS.
    • Vermifax, on 10/12/2007, -21/+26Yeah but, they're so pretty....
    • drizek, on 10/12/2007, -13/+6there are much nicer icons out there. I dont see what hte big deal is with the default OSX icons. Dont you people get tired of them?
    • estvir, on 10/12/2007, -19/+14It seems the "Windoze sucks" camp is getting desperate to prove their [apparent] superiority.
    • Vermifax, on 10/12/2007, -9/+8"Pretty, pretty! Shiny, shiny!"
    • deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Just icons? You see them every single day. You click on them. You mentally associate them with the applications you want to run. They definitely aren't "just icons" UI design is very important.
    • bsolidgold, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Nope, they certainly are 'just' icons... I couldn't care less about what my icons look like, as long as they retain their functionality.

      Yep, 'just' icons.
    • spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3If you think icons are worthless, install the CuteMenus extension for Firefox to see how much time visual aides save you.

      https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/660/
  • NonPC, on 10/12/2007, -15/+3Bahahahaa. Thanks for the laugh.
  • cmost, on 10/12/2007, -19/+14512x512????? For icons???? I can remember when screens weren't even at this resolution yet! This seems to be an unnecessary waste of resources. Microsoft will probably scrabble to increase theirs to 1024x1024 and then the race will be on! As others have said, if one needs icons that big s/he's blind and won't appreciate their beuty anyway.
    • gregmo, on 10/12/2007, -17/+12exactly. 256x256 was pushing it. 512x512 is ridiculous.They're icons...
    • bsolidgold, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4Either way, I will most likely try to find a way to cut the resolution back down to normal to optimize my resources. This is just ridiculous.
    • CeltiCowboy, on 10/12/2007, -10/+23Consider your new 70" Plasma HD TV 16' away from you. Your Mac Mini Media Center in the rack next to it. Your remote control and wireless keyboard. Suddenly 512X512 makes sense, yes?
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -3/+19@cmost: Spoken like someone who has never peered at the tiny icons on a 30" cinema display.

      As the population gets older and buys larger monitors like these, they will also want larger icons so that they can still read them.
    • xtmno3, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4Lol, get the raace going until the icons themselves have better resolution than most people's monitors...
    • tzmguitarist, on 10/12/2007, -5/+31080p is the highest resolution of HDTV regardless of your screen size and how far you are away from it. That means you have a diminishing number of pixels per square inch the larger your screen.

      Eventually you will reach a tipping point when the screen size becomes so large that the icon looks pixellated regardless of the HDTV resolution. Vector is the way to go.
    • filmil, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4I somehow fail to see the point of having huge bitmapped icons. If you really need huge icons, why not use a vectorized icon format?

      If having big icons is really important for you, you can stretch an SVG icon to be your desktop background, and still have it rendered beautifully.
    • MasterTreb, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2I think we might actually be losing some quality over this, if you brought them down to a size of say 128 X 128 you would lose a lot of quality in the process. If they had different versions of each icon that were sized differently or really really good scaling technology they might be able to get around this but that would just be a stupid waste of space and time. On top of that having 512 X 512 images are going to take a hit at performance, minuscule but it adds up.
    • vegasmacguy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7For all those out there who don't understand how icons work on Mac OS X;

      Just because a 512x512 icon is available doesn't mean it's used. Apple Icons currently store a 128x128, 64x64, 32x32 and a 16x16 version of the icon. Just having a 512x512 icon available to the system doesn't mean that its going to be loaded and taking up resources.

      Apple is looking to the future with this one. They want to have the icons able to scale to a size that can be displayed at almost any resolution a display in the next five years will deliver. I don't thing anyone will miss the extra few megabytes that are missing do to storing larger icons.
    • abdulla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@superkendall

      I'm sitting at a 30 inch cinema display now, the icons look regular-sized. How far away from the monitor do you sit?
  • twatwaffle, on 10/12/2007, -25/+5Its not hard to one up Vista when Microsofts Demos keep going like this:

    http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Microsoft_s_Windows_Vista_Fails_Speech_Recognition_Demo

    http://notquiteleet.com/ is the linked article.
    • awgneo, on 10/12/2007, -17/+16And how is speech recognition related to this at all?
      Try it for yourself in Vista. It actually works well.
    • twatwaffle, on 10/12/2007, -22/+6It works well?

      Are you ***** high?

      Watch the video then tell me it works well.

      http://notquiteleet.com/?p=9
    • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6It does work well, why Dont you actually use the OS first and then tell me it doesnt work well! trust me, its far more accurate then basing an assumtion off a video
    • ElJefeGrande, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9@twatwaffle:

      No, awqneo is not high. You are just being idiotic. A quick search of "vista speech recognition" on google brings up this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7164429646708230839&q=vista+speech+recognition&hl=en

      Enjoy.
    • twatwaffle, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3Yea unfortunately live TV is a bitch.

      The video here http://notquiteleet.com/?p=9 shows differently.
    • Kazbaeden, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3You are an idiot and a troll. You just point to the same video and repeat yourself with your fingers plugging your ears. Anyone who has actually /used/ speech recognition in Vista will tell you it's amazing.
    • mgreenwald, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Yeah it looks like that Speech Recognition works really well in that second video. The operator even has an accent. Thats better then Dragon 9.
  • DJFMA, on 10/12/2007, -15/+8I fail to see how huge icons "one-ups" vista. Isn't only being able to have 1-2 icons on your desktop a step backwards?
  • billisdog, on 10/12/2007, -8/+7Time for an arms race! I for one anticipate the signing of SILT (Size of Icons Limitation Treaties).
  • Squidly, on 10/12/2007, -13/+17"Not to be outdone by Vista and its 256x256 icons. Apple has decided that Leopard will use 512x512 icons, just to one-up Microsoft. Not only that but the entire..."

    ...Apple operating system is coated in delicious, delicious, powdered sugar.

    Try to top that, Vista!
  • VinCenT13, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1how big is to big? That's to big.
  • billisdog, on 10/12/2007, -6/+38It's not the size of your icons... it's how you use them.
  • Flanker, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2I expected this to be from RouglyDrafted.
  • krellor, on 10/12/2007, -18/+12Vista already has a resolution independant UI, so why the dig at MS on that front. The icons look cool, but your false facts don't.

    http://www.iconempire.com/info/vista-icons.htm
    • krellor, on 10/12/2007, -14/+5Yeah, dig me down because I not only point out a fact, but I give a link to support it. Damn I hate it when people provide me with unbiased factual information that I can verify with a third party.
  • ilnyckyj, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3512x512 is ridiculous...the default size for an image on ebay is only 400x400! After using a 133dpi laptop (1600x1200 on 15 inches) since 2002, I've been longing for a dpi independent ui for quite some time.
  • Topher06, on 10/12/2007, -24/+9Kind of lame really.

    I mean, Apple is in its usual position, watching the industry roll out, or about to roll out, a new product, and then say, hey, wow, we just one upped you with this.

    I mean, the specs about Vista have been floating around for 4 or more years. Microsoft wanted a relational database long before Apple had that twinkle in their eye, and low and behold, Tiger offers a semi similar feature in Spotlight, which offers quick real-time searching of files and data on OS X.

    So, at a point when Vista is polishing up its exterior, Apple's Leopard is still pretty much in heavy development, waiting for Microsoft to Innovate and apple to emulate (although Apple gets it right because hindsight is always 20/20).

    So far, Leopard has really failed to impress me with its "substantiated" feature set. 512 resolution icons, meh. Updates to Spotlight and Dashboard, meh. TimeMachine, meh. Short of a full UI update, OS X leopard will be another service pack like release which incorporates better versions of whatever new features and bells and whistles Vista offers its customers.

    As for resolution independent GUI, I mean, honestly, when are we actually going to get a monitor that supports 300dpi? It won't be this year, or next year, or the year after that. Maybe Apple will release a high-res display, but then it will be 4X more expensive the anything else on the market, and so people will avoid it for the slew of cheap 72dpi screens available today. I will say it will be at least 6 years before we get affordable 300dpi screens, so Apple rushing resolution independent GUI is just another example of how they are trying to 1 up Vista with useless features.
    • twatwaffle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20I mean, honestly, when are we actually going to get a monitor that supports 300dpi?

      You're right. We should develop operating systems of the future for year old hardware, and ignore forthcoming advances in technology.

      Oh and just because M$ says they're going to have this or that in their OS, it doesn't mean other companies also have/had this conception, in fact, relational databases are not new by any means. What is new is a software company that can actually implement this idea and have it successfully work. Unfortunately Microsoft has never been proficient in that area.
    • The_Decryptor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Tiger offers a semi similar feature in Spotlight, which offers quick real-time searching of files and data on OS X."

      Apple also showed off something similar to Spotlight during the development of Copland (but they just stole it from Cairo i hear people cry)

      It's not an entirely new idea, it's a cool one, but not a new one.
    • pero69, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"So far, Leopard has really failed to impress me with its "substantiated" feature set. 512 resolution icons, meh. Updates to Spotlight and Dashboard, meh. TimeMachine, meh. Short of a full UI update, OS X leopard will be another service pack like release which incorporates better versions of whatever new features and bells and whistles Vista offers its customers."

      Or do you mean "offered" their customers - like the things they keep taking out of vista to make it look like an XP plus pack that adds neato visuals and speech recognition. Perhaps you meant "will offer" when they actually finish it after... how long exactly?
  • woodan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10Make icons vector and they can be any size.
    • eatrains, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4The icons were probably originally created as raster files, so they could be easily scaled up for use in print. Now Apple's designers have just saved them as 512x512 icons instead of 128x128 icons.
  • Sentinel, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8I agree that bigger icons won't make a difference in the Leopard vs. Vista war, but they do look really good!
  • ViktorVaughn, on 10/12/2007, -13/+4Deleted
  • pabloD, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8As display resolutions go higher (as they invariably will), a resolution independent GUI will create more versatility in terms of text and UI element sizes, relative to the resolution of the display. In other words: no more squinting at UI text (or other elements, like *icons*) on a hi-res monitor. . . The added plus of hi-res printing off of screenshots as waalter mentions is gonna make our (print designers) lives much easier.
  • Somniis, on 10/12/2007, -7/+0As long as the screen resolution is much larger, I don't see a problem. However, on my 1024x768, they are too large to look at comfortably! (at least at 512x512 :P)
  • Intangir, on 10/12/2007, -14/+6wtf? big icons?
    linux supports svg (vector based) icons, they scale up or down however you like and look clean

    so i guess linux one ups both of them.. that is if anyone actually gave a crap about icon size restraints

    • gdamjan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Yep, that was my reaction too.

      Not only that, but a lot of the low-level API's are becoming vector based: like cairo and arthur. And accelerated at that.
      Not long and programmers will start to use those apis for everything.
  • panic, on 10/12/2007, -10/+5wow 512x512... sounds like the lamest "one-up". Would anyone actually use this? All this is going to do is fill up your HD and probably double the size of the distribution.
  • cleverhanz, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8These icons will not take up 512x512 blocks of pixels on your screen. They will appear on your screen as normal sized icons. The reason for designing them at that size is so that they can work with the resolution independent interface. If you end up using a six foot by three foot plasma screen, with a huge number of pixels across, and a huge number of pixels per inch, you need the icons to be able to scale up so they are large enough to be seen and not chunkified.
  • gregpc, on 10/12/2007, -9/+10Golly, they're so big we may need to start calling them Ohmycons.
  • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I wonder if these people saying that 512px is too big were saying the same thing about 128px icons when they're resolution was set at 640x480. Are you the same ones spewing stupid comments about ZFS's 128-bitness being overkill?
  • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2hell, screw it, lets just goto 2048x2048 icons and get it over with, wait why stop there! 4096x4096 wooohoooooo!

    seriosly, sometimes one-upsmanship is just not good
  • Ascus, on 10/12/2007, -13/+4This is getting absurd. Unless they know of some drastic upgrade of screen resolution coming up, 128K pixels for an icon is ridiculous, that is a half a megabyte in memory. 64x64 (word width) is plenty big. over that is ridiculous for display. For printing, they make sense, but they never should be used on a screen.

    All this proves is Apple designers have bigger egos, than Microsoft designers. How about they both focus development resources in fixing bugs, and plugging security holes.
    • OMGWTFROFLMAO, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4you obviously have forgotten that Mac's don't have bugs or security holes

      or virii/spyware for that matter
    • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4Hah, I love sarcasm, just not sure on the web if one is being sarcastic...or is actually being stupid
  • smart1979, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2i like them.
  • Cronus6, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2I guess I'm the only user who removed ALL the icons from the desktop has no "dock" or "quick launch" garbage... Right click menu FTW!

    Really all this "candy-ified" glossy looking OS crap makes me long for the days of DOS.
  • neosublime, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5This is gonna look so nice on my 1080i 42" Plasma TV!!!!!!!!
    • SniperGX1, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9heh interlaced... way to blow ur load too early
    • stealthboy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3And your 1080i display has a max resolution of 1920x1080 pixels.... So your point is?
  • Jeffrey903, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Is it just me or is the Expose icon really ugly? Everything else looks so nice, but the expose one looks pretty bad to me.
    • wolever, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Yea, the Exposé icon is pretty crummy.
    • JesseJericho, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yup, I was about to say the same thing... it doesn't follow the others at all.
    • Nonsuch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Ditto. Try again Apple!
  • digitallysick, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4it comes with bigger icons! wow, im sold! .............
  • Stopher, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7"It goes to 11."
  • dwemer, on 10/12/2007, -11/+4I don't know what people are talking about, those icons don't look good. The edges are jagged and aliased. The bad edges on the time machine and safari 3 logos are especially noticeable.
    • haxored, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Here's an idea. Use a browser that can display a PNG with alpha, instead of the utter piece of crap that is IE6. If you tried Firefox, you'd see they look fine.
  • clyde2801, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Coming up next...Tiger one upped Vista!
  • digjedi, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4And the linux fanboys are suspiciously quiet on this whole thing. Is it cause they have icons much smaller than Vista or OSX?!?! Linux will never be main stream until they have 1024x1024 icons!!! :-P
    • ImmortalLobster, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6Nope, they already have vector based icons IIRC, i think the linux bois are just hanging back laughing at both Mac and Windows. ;)
  • d3dm, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Why don't they just cut to the chase and specify that all icons henceforth will be 10-level mipmaps (1x1, 512x512) and be done with it?
  • shreky, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2Why would anyone need 512x512 icons. There is a reason most people don't use 800x600 resolutions. It's because most people like everything to fit on their screen and not be intrusive.
    I think 64x64 is perfect and anything larger just doesn't make sense.
  • luckyjonny, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Great! It's true. In the future people won't wear glasses.
  • indiekid, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I think everyone's losing focus as to what this actually means. The icons aren't the most significant part, not by far, they're just eye candy. The real value is in resolution independance. As far as I know, this also means that a monitor could display a resolution higher than it's rated for...but I'm not sure if that's 100% correct...
    • coldfusion1970, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1More importantly doesnt it mean that Apple could run their GUI on MUCH smaller devices with minimal issues ;-)

      Hands-up all those who thought the Apple tablet computer was dead?
  • gxcdesign, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5A lot of this is due to technology like Front Row where icons do grow bigger and they may as well get nice and sharp
  • xodex, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4got to admit, those icons are beautiful. (Windows User)
  • ThirdPrize, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Surely if they are vector based either OS could have them any size they wanted. Good job all the processors are (at least) dual core these days. One for the desktop and one for the app.
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