Leopard Menu Text
It's not a difference you'd probably ever really notice, but Leopard's standard menus now use color to create the dark gray text you see throughout the interface (though not in the menubar).
Tiger's Menu Text: Black, White and Gray
(click image for larger view)
I'm not sure the reason for the change — perhaps to add a warmth and a softness to the text.
Leopard's Menu Text: Now in Full Color
(click image for larger view)
Tiger's Menu Text: Black, White and Gray
(click image for larger view)
I'm not sure the reason for the change — perhaps to add a warmth and a softness to the text.
Leopard's Menu Text: Now in Full Color
(click image for larger view)
It's a subtle difference, almost imperceptible. And I'm curious what the thinking was behind this change. If anyone has any clues, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.
UPDATE:
John Gruber has the answer over at Daring Fireball, actually. Turns out this is nothing new and not a difference between Leopard and Tiger. What you're seeing here, generally, is the difference between standard and sub-pixel anti-aliasing, two techniques for anti-aliasing text. What you're seeing, specific to my two computers, is the difference between the "Standard" and "Light" Font smoothing style settings in the Appearance Preferences. "Standard," as you might guess, uses standard anti-aliasing — i.e. shades of gray — to anti-alias text, whereas any of the other settings use sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which uses color to achieve the same effect. Turns out I've always preferred standard, even on LCDs. Weird.
More details here.
UPDATE:
John Gruber has the answer over at Daring Fireball, actually. Turns out this is nothing new and not a difference between Leopard and Tiger. What you're seeing here, generally, is the difference between standard and sub-pixel anti-aliasing, two techniques for anti-aliasing text. What you're seeing, specific to my two computers, is the difference between the "Standard" and "Light" Font smoothing style settings in the Appearance Preferences. "Standard," as you might guess, uses standard anti-aliasing — i.e. shades of gray — to anti-alias text, whereas any of the other settings use sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which uses color to achieve the same effect. Turns out I've always preferred standard, even on LCDs. Weird.
More details here.
Labels: Applications, Leopard, MacOSX
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 2:30 PM.
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12:54 AMI have no idea either but standing across the room and looking at your web page blow ups two things are apparent. 1) you can't see the colors and 2) the color one looks more uniform (look at the upper part of the C) and more bold (look at the leg and curve of the R).
My guess is this. You can have more bold if you use colors because if two letters are adjacent in grey then a dark grey bold would bleed together but on these letters red is on the left and blue on the right so dark red and dark blue still have a contrast.
In the eye the ganglia are set up to sharpen edges of contrasting regions. So my guess is that this principle works for the cones as well as the rods meaning that the contrast between the red and blue separation is enhanced even if they have the same grey level.
9:39 PM
Hmmm... An interesting theory. Wish I had more time to look into this.
Thanks for standing across the room.
-systemsboy
1:56 AM
That's called sub-pixel antialiasing. It's well understood- and it's been around way longer than Leopard. Google.
Cheers
8:37 AM
Right, which is why I made a correction in an update to the article, which if you'd read the entire (short) page you would have seen. Not sure how you lack time to read an entire article that you clearly have time to comment on.
But thanks loads for the smarmy comment. You really made my day.
Why don't you go google condescending.
Cheers.
-systemsboy
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