Hi all..

Can anyone shed some light on a little "secret" or whatever's needed to remove the "I'm gonna make you feel like you're drunk" OTT blur (oops.. I mean anti-aliasing) on an Apple iCrap? Staring at that blurry mess all day is starting to piss me off but the 'only affect fonts below...' option in sysprefs seems to affect sweet FA

Any info appreciated.

TIA



Regards,

Ian

I've looked before now, and there doesn't seem to be a way to actually turn it off completely - at least not in Tiger or Leopard.

What i---- are we actually talking about...

Thanks James. Dunno what name it has, all I know is it's OS X 10.5. I'm not a Mac person at all (last "Mac" I ever used for any length of time was an old Archemedies(sp?) (this this has ties with Apple anyway) about 18 years ago at school for art ).

I'll have to go on a hunt for some alternative fixed-width fonts and see if I can find any that don't get affected quite so badly. It really is a strain on the eyes when coding all day with it. Looks more like gaussian blur than anti-aliasing to me


TGL.. no idea, heh. All I know is it's a white "all-in-one monitor / box" and had a ridiculously stupid keyboard layout.. even with the UK map, the Home / End keys are fubar. Makes working with Vim a real PITA. Personally, I'd sooner have one of the FreeBSD servers and install X on it as a desktop!



Regards,

Ian

It's not anti-aliasing, it's OS X rendering fonts as they were intended without any alteration, rather than optimising them for screen. Microsoft renders them within the boundaries of the pixel grid. Microsoft's technique looks better on small monitors, but up the size and it appears sharp and blocky. It looks weird until you get used to it, then Windows looks terrible and basic.

edit: Sounds like you're on an eMac. I can imagine it looking a bit too blurry on there. My parents use a tiny CRT monitor with their PowerMac and it drives me nuts, but my 20" iMac is fine.

Quote from spookthehamster :

It's not anti-aliasing, it's OS X rendering fonts as they were intended without any alteration, rather than optimising them for screen. Microsoft renders them within the boundaries of the pixel grid. Microsoft's technique looks better on small monitors, but up the size and it appears sharp and blocky. It looks weird until you get used to it, then Windows looks terrible and basic.

Maybe it's just being used to a windoze / Unix screen, but it just seems waaaaay OTT to me.. whatever the technique used.

I've found a couple of TTF fonts that might help, will try when I get in in the morning

Quote :

edit: Sounds like you're on an eMac. I can imagine it looking a bit too blurry on there. My parents use a tiny CRT monitor with their PowerMac and it drives me nuts, but my 20" iMac is fine.

It's one of them in the attachment (imac apparently).. whatever it is. The screen's 20" or so though running 1680x1050 res.



Regards,

Ian

Ahh, the same poision I choose to use. I don't mind mine at all with the fonts, and they actually look nicer IMO. I think though that you can adjust the font smoothing to make it a bit less harsh. Under Appearance, you can set it to Standard, which takes it down a considerable amount, and then tell it not to smooth fonts above 14, which should also help if you're coding (maybe).

Hope this helps

It's really about the fact that apple have gone for how things look on paper ( Remember that Mac is primarily used for design. )
Try going to Appearance and choose "Medium - Best for Flat Panel"

If thats still not ok then try going to http://www.atpm.com/12.01/paradigm.shtml and turn off font smoothing under 9 as well as using a different systems font like Verdana or Osaka

Thanks lads. Shame Crapple don't seem to realise that screen and print are two _very_ different concepts! There again, IMO, macs (and anything from apple) are just over-priced gimmicks

I installed the 'Envy Code R' font for use in the shell / Komodo. This has helped a bit.. and a damn sight nicer looking than "I wanna be a fixed-width Comic Sans" monaco

I'll try some further stuff later to try and help the display in Firefox. Don't really use much else on here so the rest doesn't bother me so much.



Regards,

Ian

Since its OSX can't you change the renderer to freetype? Or is it what they're already using in there?

Quote from xaotik :

Since its OSX can't you change the renderer to freetype? Or is it what they're already using in there?

Tbh, I don't know.. I'm really not clued up on macs.

I've now set the blurring to 'light' and with the new font for Komodo etc, it doesn't look so bad. When selecting the various blur methods, it seems to take a random period of time too update, probably why I thought this setting had zero effect.

The light setting at least in Firefox is now producing something closer to clear-type on windoze, I can tolerate this now



Regards,

Ian

You'll probably need to relaunch Finder for it to apply to everything, in the same way that Windows would relaunch Explorer.

Take some time to learn and after a few months you'll realise they're much more than over-priced gimmicks. Approach things with an open mind, rather than telling yourself in advance they'll be crap.

If you want to relaunch Finder, simply do a Force Quit on it, it restarts cleanly (unlike Explorer).

I can't agree more with spook's sentiments about Macs, though. About a year ago, I started using a Mac with the same attitude as you, Ian, and now I wouldn't want to trade it for anything (if you ignore my gaming preferences, for example). I love it.

I hadn't thought about reloading finder (I don't think about restarting explorer either usually (possibly as I use DOpus as a complete explorer replacement.. or as complete as it can be anyway)). I only noticed this earlier when somehow, only half of the menus etc in Firefox had changed to the new setting and was what made me try again with it. Setting it to 'CRT' seems to almost completely disable it, but the end result isn't quite as nice as the windoze interpretation of unaliased displays.. but the more I read about how the mac tries various things, this is less of a surprise now

In regards to them being crap.. I guess a lot is down to humans not liking change. I cursed the "new" windoze keys on keyboards years ago as I haven't _that_ long ago got rid of a great keyboard that didn't have them.. there just seems many "silly" quirks, like they did things just to be different (such as the home / end keys for example, which _really_ bug me when using the likes of Vim.. thankfully Komodo seems to remap them and cure the issue).

Things like the ipod don't help with my view either. It's not much more than a glorified MP4 player, but as it has a "ahead of its time design".. you pay 3 times the amount... Commodore was just the same back in the day too.. although I loved my Amigas

I guess over time, I may start to like it. The fact it runs on top of a Unix platform is a bonus in its favour.. just a shame it's not a little more like "plain" Unix where you have a choice of window manager.. I'm not keen on all the fluff it comes with.

As far as it goes as an OS itself, seems to be fine. Stable, allows me to work, plays music in the background, heh.. and the likes of the unified menu bar (ie: it seems to have a standard structure throughout all apps.. 'prefs' are within the app's titled menu rather than maybe in file, edit or tools as per most windoze apps etc) just wish things could be a little more standard with it in the usual areas ('ctrl' and 'control' being "swapped" bug me too). I have no deep feelings about them being crap. Everyone I know who uses one loves it.. just my first impressions really aren't that good.. but we'll see as time progresses. The firm exclusively use macs for desktops and freebsd for servers, so not like I have a great deal of choice in the matter if I want to stay there



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Ian.H :

i Crap blur

you'd make a great video editing filter then

Quote from squidhead :

you'd make a great video editing filter then

oh.. ha ha hahah ha.. please, someone stitch my sides back together...... no, really


Regards,

Ian

Ian, in Keyboard settings you can customize what keys act as what. I do realize that Command acts a lot like ctrl would.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Ian, in Keyboard settings you can customize what keys act as what. I do realize that Command acts a lot like ctrl would.

Thanks Dustin. I did have a quick gander in there, but IIRC, the mapping was assigned using some obfuscated code (or that's how it looked) heh and something else I'm unfamiliar with (the specifics anyway). I'll have another look today

All in all, I think the biggest draw back atm, is the fact it's a work box, not something I can sit at home and mess about with for a few hours. I've never worked for such a flexible boss before, but am assuming he'd like to see some work

I'm slowly getting used to using control+s etc to save, now to get used to using funky combinations to move between words on a line instead of flicking between desktops.

Need to find out how easy / what cost is involved with running windoze apps on a mac soon too. Komodo's fine for Perl development, but would much prefer to use NuSphere PHPEd for PHP work, but there's no mac version. Does anyone have any preferences for that task here? (no idea if there's multiple options yet, will search later).

Appreciate the responses, especially with such negativity in my OP.. frustration can be a bitch



Regards,

Ian

Well, If you want to do Virtualization, you could use VMWare or Parallels (Parallels is likely your best bet, due to nearly all their dev eggs going into the OSX basket, and it shows). If you want to run it natively, you should be able to go to /Applications/Utilities/ and their should be a Boot Camp Assistant.app in there, and it's a simple manner of following instructions to install Windows.

There are three things I'm yet to conquer in OS X. And if anyone with any more experience can help me, that'd be brilliant.

1. If you press Ctrl+Arrow on a Windows machine in a text box, you jump *words* rather than characters... what's the key combination in OS X, if there is one?
   
2. Does anyone have a good IDE (for pretty much anything) that *isn't* derived from Eclipse in some way, shape or form? I'm particularly looking for something for C#.
   
3. What's a quick way to make a '#' - as the keyboard helpfully lacks one.
   

James,
1) I think it's Alt+Arrow.
2) Dunno, can't help there
3) Alt+3.

Also Ian - My preferred app for editing PHP (and web code in general) is Coda. It's a very nice app in my experiences.

James; that was the first thing that bugged me.. the keyboard layout is really messed up. Seemed like basically a US layout with it's own "twist"

First thing I grabbed was a fix for this. Half way down this page are a couple of files with install info if needed on swapping over to a UK layout.. has increased my productivity 10-fold

Alt+Left / Right jumps through words on a line as Dustin says, also allowing shift to be held for selection purposes.

No idea about IDE though.


Dustin; thanks for the info above. I'll check some of these out and have a chat with The Boss(tm). I've been using NuPhere PHPEd for ages now and just thinking about familiarity. I'll have a peek at Coda too though



Regards,

Ian

The Apple layout does have it's benefits though, to do umlauts, it's alt+U, then whatever vowel you want umlauted, to do the accents, it's alt+` or alt+e for the various accents. It just takes some getting used to, but once you do, It becomes tons easier.

James, I'm not sure how Xcode is as an IDE, seeing I'm not a developer, or a designer, although I am trying to learn, but it's worth giving it a shot, seeing it's right on your OSX disk. There is a C#+Mono plugin for Xcode, so it's worth a try.

Thanks for the selection thing, guys (and the hash, Dustin)... I guess I should have experimented a little more.

As for XCode, I do tend to use that for C/C++ development, but wasn't aware of the C#/Mono plugin for it, so I'll go and give it a try.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

The Apple layout does have it's benefits though, to do umlauts, it's alt+U, then whatever vowel you want umlauted, to do the accents, it's alt+` or alt+e for the various accents. It just takes some getting used to, but once you do, It becomes tons easier.

Well, you can do that on Windows anyway, through use of Alt Gr + punctuation before you type a character.

I've never heard of this Alt Gr key in my life prior to that, nor have I ever needed it for doing anything other than writing Touche. I'm not sure how the C#/mono bits will work, seeing it doesn't have any of the Intellisense stuff that Visual Studio does, but if it works for you, then splendid.