OS X:Why It “Looks” So Different.
18 August, 2008 by Greg Ferro Print Posting
When you first eyeball OS X, I mean, really, actually look at it and use it for a bit, you realise that it looks different. During some reading, I found out why.
Of course, Mac OS X is going to look different, the menus and screen movement is different from Windows. But there is something about the look that really made it “stand out” different to my eyes.
Monitor Colouring
I was working with monitor calibration the other day, and had a Windows machine to check the difference. Thats when I realised that the displays are actually coloured differently.
You can see most clearly if you head to the System Preferences, Display, and then Color. The default setting is “White OS Native”.
Basically, the default colour settings for a MAC is to use a pure white. I am no colour expert, but the screen seems brighter and has more “pop”.
If you select the “Blue White PC” you will notice that the screen now has a faint blue / yellow tinge. This is meant to be a ‘cooler’ colour that is more pleasing and more natural. This is the default settings for Windows.
Font Smoothing
I think we all know about Cleartype font smoothing on Windows and how it dramatically improves font readability and that Apple would have something similar. This group of technologies is actually “Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering” that makes up the result.
Where they differ is in philosophy.
* Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
* Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.
Now that Safari for Windows is available, which goes to great trouble to use Apple’s rendering algorithms, you can actually compare the philosophies side-by-side on the very same monitor and see what I mean. I think you’ll notice the difference. Apple’s fonts are indeed fuzzy, with blurry edges, but at small font sizes, there seems to be much more variation between different font families, because their rendering is truer to what the font would look like if it were printed at high resolution.
This is discussed in full at Joel on Software and he clearly shows the differences.
So on an Apple Mac, the same page will display just a bit differently.
You say rooter, I say rowder
I have personally found that I prefer the font and colours on the Mac. I have to use Windows machines at work occasionally , and they just don’t look so appealing.
I find it fascinating that the same hardware can be manipulated to create a different look that can affect the consumers impression of a product. I suspect at least some of this is marketing, or sheer bloody mindedness from Apple but it not really a big deal.
Now I tend to calibrate my screen to suit my own taste, I guess I just don’t like being mainstream and using the ‘default settings’.
Perhaps you could equate Windows looking “cool” to the “humor” of an archetypal Monty Python Chartered Accountant telling a joke. Even if someone has decorated their desktop nicely there are still the ghastly lines under some of the letters to show you the keyboard shortcuts.
I first became aware of Windows as 3.1, when the difference in appearance between the Mac interface at the time was huge. The graphics were simply horrible. Windows 95 was hardly an improvement either. Looking like a cross between the NeXT and the Apple GUIs in vibrant 8 bit color, it was the exact equivalent, in the culinary world, of a cheap hamburger, in the literary world, of Reader’s Digest and in the world of music, of the crap they play in supermarkets and airport departure lounges.
There is a reason for this.
Everything about Windows reeks of committee, of group think. A group is wonderful for getting a job done, for support, but not for getting original ideas. Groups don’t create. Individuals do. There is no great work of art that was created by a team.
John Davis
Macs work great for colour press work.
Have done with it, and set comic sans as your default font ;). Even if you spend most of the day using the terminal, the colour calibration and the font smooth seems to make a difference. It’s the little things!