What will Apple announce at WWDC06? There will no doubt be some surprises, but here are some well known inevitabilities, some reasonable possibilities for new apps, new UI, and new hardware, and a few commonly repeated ideas that – sorry – have no chance!
Known Inevitabilities
First and most obviously, Apple will finish features previewed or suggested in Tiger. Here’s a list of things that are known:
Quartz 2D Extreme will provide hardware accelerated 2D drawing, speeding the display of everything on the screen. Apple already delivered 3D acceleration, but had only finished Quartz 2D, the basic replacement to Classic Mac QuickDraw, in Tiger. By offloading more drawing functions to the graphics card, performance increases overall.
Resolution independence enables users to set a resolution multiplier to make windows and icons appear larger or smaller at the same resolution. This feature allows use of higher resolution screens with denser pixels, without making the interface items too small.
Apple included initial elements of Resolution independence in Tiger, but didn’t expose the technology for users. The Quartz Debug app included in Tiger’s Developer Tools includes a preview for testing purposes.
This is different than simply bumping up the size of text or window controls; it requires support from developers, because much of the custom UI in an app is based on bitmap graphics, not vectors. Resolution independence would be easier to pull off if Apple also announces an increased use of vectors to draw icons and interface elements. Think: Vectorized NIBs.
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RoughlyDrafted
What will Apple announce at WWDC06? There will no doubt be some surprises, but here are some well known inevitabilities, some reasonable possibilities for new apps, new UI, and new hardware, and a few commonly repeated ideas that – sorry – have no chance!
Known Inevitabilities
First and most obviously, Apple will finish features previewed or suggested in Tiger. Here’s a list of things that are known:
Quartz 2D Extreme will provide hardware accelerated 2D drawing, speeding the display of everything on the screen. Apple already delivered 3D acceleration, but had only finished Quartz 2D, the basic replacement to Classic Mac QuickDraw, in Tiger. By offloading more drawing functions to the graphics card, performance increases overall.
Resolution independence enables users to set a resolution multiplier to make windows and icons appear larger or smaller at the same resolution. This feature allows use of higher resolution screens with denser pixels, without making the interface items too small.
Apple included initial elements of Resolution independence in Tiger, but didn’t expose the technology for users. The Quartz Debug app included in Tiger’s Developer Tools includes a preview for testing purposes.
This is different than simply bumping up the size of text or window controls; it requires support from developers, because much of the custom UI in an app is based on bitmap graphics, not vectors. Resolution independence would be easier to pull off if Apple also announces an increased use of vectors to draw icons and interface elements. Think: Vectorized NIBs.
Read more…
Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RoughlyDrafted
