dispatchEvent()™ » Mac OS X

Leopard 10.5 supports 512 pixel icons

Mims H Wright — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:22:37 +0000

While playing around with Icon Composer in the newest version of XCode Tools for I noticed that Leopard now supports 512×512 pixel icons – much larger than the older 128×128 pixel icons. I assume this has to do with the Cover Flow view for the Finder which displays icons much larger than the other views. Sure enough, Apple have redesigned all their icons for the new format and they look gorgeous. I took some screen grabs of my favourites. Click the thumbnails to see the details. Notice the small text in the iTunes and Dictionary icons and the textures on the truck and the guitar. Hawt!

Click for full size

Dictionary

Garage Band

iTunes

TextEdit

Transmit

Really, really small Flex files

Mims H Wright — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:02:29 +0000

I am not even going to mention that Flex 3 public beta is out because you already know.

What you may have been too excited to notice though is that Flex 3 will now cache the Flex framework for users meaning that Flex applications don’t have to save all of that stuff in the SWF file making them very small (like 50KB). Think about that! This is huge news and I predict it will be the final stroke that wins many Flex skeptics over to the platform. Not only that, but you’ll be able to include your own custom runtime shared libraries (also cached) so you can create functionality that’s shared between several applications.

Ted Patrick, in his evangelical way, describes this feature with handy diagrams on his blog.

There is also an introduction to new features on Adobe Labs so you can gush over videos and samples of all the new features.

On a side note, it looks like Leopard, the new version of OS X, will provide significant improvements for quickly accessing your porn.

Aliased Text in Eclipse on OS X

Roger Braunstein — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:02:53 +0000

Maybe I’m just a crotchety, old-school, Jolt-drinking, amber-on-black, command-line code junkie, but for the last 2 years I’ve been so frustrated that I just can’t get my code font in Eclipse / Flex Builder on Mac OS X to be aliased! Those little smooth edges on my fixed-width bitmap fonts drove me to irrational madness. Well, I had given up and moved to PC, but I’ve had Mac laptops throughout, and I finally took some time to solve this little pet peeve. If you share my frustration, read on.

Arrrgh!

Ahhhh…

As far as I can tell, there’s no way to turn off anti-aliasing in the Eclipse preferences, or in OS X’s Java preferences. Eclipse will insist on anti-aliasing even a perfectly fine bitmap font at its natural size.

The only way I saw around this was to “Turn off text smoothing for sizes N and smaller,” in the Appearance pane of System Preferences. Of course I could sacrifice all anti-aliasing globally by turning it off here, but I do like nicely AA text when I’m not writing code. My preferred coding font, the excellent Proggy Square by Tristan Grimmer (available free at www.proggyfonts.com), appears pixel-for-pixel at a point size of 16. Disabling anti-aliasing for fonts smaller than or equal to 16pt was clearly not much better than globally disabling it.

So, all I did was a fairly stupid hack. I opened up fontforge, an incredible open source font editor, scaled up all the glyphs in the font to 400%, changed the name of the font so it could coexist with my original Proggy Square, and saved it out. Now I have Eclipse use my modified Proggy Square Huge at 4pt for code text — the same visual size as it was before at 16pt — and I have disabled anti-aliasing for all fonts 4pt and lower, which is completely reasonable, as anything but an intentionally broken font would appear illegible at that size anyway.

You can apply these steps to your own monospace font of choice to overcome this limitation in Flex Builder / Eclipse / Java on OS X. Or, you can download my copy of Proggy Square Huge. All credit for this font goes to its creator, Tristan.

Download Proggy Square Huge (OTF, works on Mac/Win, 34K).