[moonmonkey]

Why has nobody thought of this, could it be a feature for Panther?
Explanation:

You know you can zoom in with Jaguar, what if you could zoom out too, everything on the desktop would be scaled down but the desktop size would increase (still fill the screen), this would give you a virtual Resolution much higher than the physical resolution of the screen.

You handle many more files, windows and apps at once.

The zoom feature could be active and zoom in and out depending on what is selected and what you are doing, this could be linked to the scroll wheel aswell.

I would pay $100 for that.

[moonmonkey]

Perhaps I didn't explain it properly.

[sniffer]

No no, you did explain it well. Perhaps a tip to send to Apple feedback?
Another way would be to get, and I sometimes miss, virtual resolution the way it typical works on windows, where the desktop gets bigger than the resolution and you can scroll to any part of the desktop screen by moving the coursor to sides of the actual screen..
And ofcourse some implemention of virtual desktops. I think virtual desktops the way it's implantet works extremely well on kde on linux.

[ShotgunEd]

Originally posted by sniffer:
No no, you did explain it well. Perhaps a tip to send to Apple feedback?
Another way would be to get, and I sometimes miss, virtual resolution the way it typical works on windows, where the desktop gets bigger than the resolution and you can scroll to any part of the desktop screen by moving the coursor to sides of the actual screen..
And ofcourse some implemention of virtual desktops. I think virtual desktops the way it's implantet works extremely well on kde on linux.

My macpicasso video card did that scrolling desktop thing. it was uberhandy in Photoshop where you could zoom in on an a4 picture and just scroll up and down it at will. No screen redraw needed. I've been using codetek virtual desktops of late and it is great. Seems to be a bit of a memory hog though.

[Mithras]

Originally posted by sniffer:
Another way would be to get, and I sometimes miss, virtual resolution the way it typical works on windows, where the desktop gets bigger than the resolution and you can scroll to any part of the desktop screen by moving the coursor to sides of the actual screen..

I miss that from my Amiga, circa 1987. You'd choose the size of the screen, and independently choose the resolution (including hi-res 640x200 option!)...

[Lew]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
Why has nobody thought of this, could it be a feature for Panther?
Explanation:

You know you can zoom in with Jaguar, what if you could zoom out too, everything on the desktop would be scaled down but the desktop size would increase (still fill the screen), this would give you a virtual Resolution much higher than the physical resolution of the screen.

You handle many more files, windows and apps at once.

The zoom feature could be active and zoom in and out depending on what is selected and what you are doing, this could be linked to the scroll wheel aswell.

I would pay $100 for that.

I wondered the same thing myself. When scaling a 1024x768 screenshot down to 800x600 or even 640x480 I noticed that the text is still quite readable. You could probably get away with a virtual 1280x1024 (or possibly 1600x1200 at a push) screen on a 1024x768 LCD.

As an example, here's a 1024x768 screenshot scaled down to 512x384. To me, this is still very readable, and it would effectively quadruple the screen area.

[Lew]

*BUMP!*

Any of the developers fancy giving some input on this one?

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
Why has nobody thought of this, could it be a feature for Panther?
Explanation:

You know you can zoom in with Jaguar, what if you could zoom out too, everything on the desktop would be scaled down but the desktop size would increase (still fill the screen), this would give you a virtual Resolution much higher than the physical resolution of the screen.

You handle many more files, windows and apps at once.

The zoom feature could be active and zoom in and out depending on what is selected and what you are doing, this could be linked to the scroll wheel aswell.

I would pay $100 for that.

That's a sterling idea! Wonder if there's some reason they didn't implement it.

Two questions come to mind though. What about the Dock? What about the menu bar?

[Lew]

With the scrolled screen I'd imagine that the menu bar and dock would have to stay anchored to the edges of the physical display while the desktop scrolled under them (although this would raise the problem whereby you could end up with icons underneath the dock/menu bar). How do the X11 window managers handle this?

With the zoomed-out screen the menu bar and dock would be able to remain as they are now because the entire screen area would be visible.

[Cipher13]

The simple answer is to globally scale down every object... that can't be all that difficult to do, right? Programming wise, anyway... but what would I know...

[Lew]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
The simple answer is to globally scale down every object... that can't be all that difficult to do, right? Programming wise, anyway... but what would I know...

I'd imagine it shouldn't be too different than the way a 640x480 or 800x600 image is scaled up to 1024x768 on my Pismo. It's just going in the opposite direction.

[010111]

most PCs seem to do this... as i have accidently set them to like 1280x1024 before on a 1024x768 native LCD... bam! i have a 1280x1024 picture scrolling all around a 1024x768 native 'window'... it's kinda cool... not somethign i'd leave on for a default... but if i *needed* the extra space it might be nice to have this feature.

if you mean shriking everything down... that isn't as cool... it most likely would look funky on an LCD when at non-native... just like running non-native but smaller looks gross now.

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
The simple answer is to globally scale down every object... that can't be all that difficult to do, right? Programming wise, anyway... but what would I know...

This is what I had in Mind, Everything except the dock gets smaller, Icons, menu bar the works.


This would be no problem for Quartz to do, Im sure there would be some issues in making this work, but nothing Apple couldn't handle.

The only issue is that there would be less incentive for people to buy higher res monitors.

[moonmonkey]

...BUMP....

[Mskr]

Speaking from experience with CodeTek VirtualDesktop development, I'd have to say that this would be something that Apple would have to do, as it really wouldn't be possible to do and have all applications/windows work properly. The main thing is that not all applications like having their windows moved by some outside agent; the main example is Microsoft Word. In the beta testing portion of CodeTek VirtualDesktop's 2.0 existence, you could move Word windows around using using CTVD, and when we moved the main window around, pieces of the window (text, controls, etc.) would be left behind in the original location and the window contents would get corrupted! The other application that didn't like having its windows moved was X11 (and XDarwin, and OroborOSX), but those apps have now been fixed to work with CTVD. Anyway, the only way that I can think a 3rd party developer would be able to do this is to move the windows around when you 'hit' the edges of the screen, but it wouldn't work with all applications, and the menu bar and dock would all have to remain in place.

We've gotten a lot of requests for this, but unfortunately, it's not really feasible. Let alone the crazy 'scaling down' version of this idea, which is cool, but completely in Apple's hands and not at all possible for a 3rd party developer...

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by Mskr:

We've gotten a lot of requests for this, but unfortunately, it's not really feasible. Let alone the crazy 'scaling down' version of this idea, which is cool, but completely in Apple's hands and not at all possible for a 3rd party developer...

...what, not even Unsanity?! They seem to have a freaky amount of knowledge/information about OS X. Makes me wonder if they're using unreleased APIs.

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
...what, not even Unsanity?! They seem to have a freaky amount of knowledge/information about OS X. Makes me wonder if they're using unreleased APIs.

um, its CodeTek.

Anyway I would assume this has to be done at an OS level by Apple, as it would effect the entire opperation of the OS, it would be such a fundamental alteration that it would change the way we use the computer totaly.

Imagine the interface inteligently zooming in and out to display relivant items, with a unlimited ammount of screen space.

Im getting realy exited about this!

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by 010111:
if you mean shriking everything down... that isn't as cool... it most likely would look funky on an LCD when at non-native... just like running non-native but smaller looks gross now.

I Think it would look ok, you may only be zoomed totaly out for a split second while you are looking for something, then you dive back in to work closer up.

[C.J. Moof]

Look at it from this angle:

You can have a desktop with a 1600x1200 display (for example) and a laptop with 1024x768. Put Timbuktu on both of them. Start a control session of the desktop from the laptop, use both the full screen and shrink to fit options, and you've got 1600x1200 reduced into VGA space.

Now... if we could just use this same logic to run a Timbuktu server with a virtual 1600x1200 screen on the powerbook with a VGA display, connect to locahost:port that is the local TB2 server, and whamo, there ya go. Same logic as connecting your browser to Apache running on your same computer.

So instead of being the remote display for a real machine across the network, you're now being the display for a virtual machine INSIDE your own.

Whaddya think?

(edit: localhost:port makes an unwanted tongue-sticking-out smiley if not disabled. hehh)

[Mskr]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
...what, not even Unsanity?! They seem to have a freaky amount of knowledge/information about OS X. Makes me wonder if they're using unreleased APIs.

Yes, dare I say it, not even by Unsanity. (Not just throwing down a gauntlet here, but I truly think that it just wouldn't work! ) We also use various undocumented APIs, which wouldn't solve this problem. What this poster is talking about would be nothing short of replacing the window manager with some 3rd party one, which is not feasible because it would break everything that you didn't make 100% compatible. To make it 100% compatible, I think you'd need to base it off of the source code that Apple has, which they're not likely to give or license to anyone else.

Anyway, I'm not willing to say that it's IMPOSSIBLE, but just highly unlikely. Also, it would be a huge amount of effort for a 3rd party to do, and financially it wouldn't be feasible. I know that everyone who just read that sentence will now say silently (or not) to themselves, "But I'd buy it!". However, most Mac users (IMO) are loathe to part with more than $50 (tops) for software, even something as cool as this would be. Please keep in mind that when I say "most Mac users", I'm talking about the people who most likely aren't going to be spending any time on boards like this. But, those are the people that 3rd party developers need to sell to, since it is the majority of the market.

Bottom line: This is only feasible if Apple does it, and people would see it as a great feature if it was included in the OS. Most people would see this as a value added in a for-pay upgrade where they wouldn't want to pay a 3rd party very much for it.

I could be completely wrong about all of this. I'm working from assumptions that I have based on my experience with Apple & Mac users. Only time will tell...

[sniffer]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
um, its CodeTek.

Anyway I would assume this has to be done at an OS level by Apple, as it would effect the entire opperation of the OS, it would be such a fundamental alteration that it would change the way we use the computer totaly.

Imagine the interface inteligently zooming in and out to display relivant items, with a unlimited ammount of screen space.

Im getting realy exited about this!

This idea is also starting to grow on me.
I can image it would have been something like when you are zooming pictures in iPhoto... That would've been an amazing change in the way we interact with our computers..

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
um, its CodeTek.

I wasn't talking about CodeTek and Virtual Desktop. I was referring (albeit somewhat cryptically) to Unsanity's line of amazing software. Fruitmenu, MightyMouse and so on and so forth.

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
I wasn't talking about CodeTek and Virtual Desktop. I was referring (albeit somewhat cryptically) to Unsanity's line of amazing software. Fruitmenu, MightyMouse and so on and so forth.

Understood, I think only one company could make this happen though.

[moonmonkey]

Apple new feature in 10.3 "Expose" looks very similar to the idea above.

Maybe we gave them, the idea?

[Some Guy []]

i think someone already coded something like this at a machack a few years ago for os 8/9.


-justin