OS X:Why It “Looks” So Different.

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’.

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