“All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels. It’s a step toward making the operating system resolution independent, and perhaps also to make Snow Leopard a touchscreen friendly OS,” Leander Kahney reports for Cult of Mac.
“But it’s also obviously done just for the art of it. These icons are real beauties. They are full of great details and little surprises. One icon contains the words to a song, visible only if you blow it up to its full size,” Kahney reports.
Here are two samples to whet your appetite, Apple’s icon for Automator (yes, that’s an icon, folks) followed by Apple’s rather humorous networking browsing icon for a Windows PC icon:
Kahney offers many more gorgeous examples in his full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Judge Bork” for the heads up.]
Man the Coda icon is sweet up close. You can see tiny hairs on the stem of the leaf.
I must say this is inspiring!
@Cubert
In Leopard they only displayed at 128×128 but they were in fact drawn at 512×512. The above article says “All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels” which implies this is something new. It is not. You can copy an icon from a default Leopard app and open it with preview to see what I’m talking about. They are drawn at 512×512 – this is not new.
I made this comparison a few days ago:
“The file icons in Snow Leopard can be bigger than the original Mac’s screen. Consider that for a minute. This icon for the System folder in Snow Leopard is LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE SCREEN of the original line of Macs.”
I have a shot of the original Mac’s screen superimposed over a SL icon in the article here.
@treestman,
As a user of the original Mac 128k, it’s unbelievable to see a 512×512 icon with the old porthole 512×384 Mac screen superimposed. It’s truly amazing what has happened in computing now that 25 years has passed! Lordy, I’m getting old!
Oh, and awesome blog! It’s bookmarked!
Cheers!
@PastryChef
Oddly enough, the Keynote icon contains the song lyrics.
Why is Apple still messing around with bit-mapped icons at all? At this stage of the game they should all be vector graphics.
Resolution independence. Promised by Jobs years ago, not yet delivered. Let’s hope Jobs’ vision become reality before Vista 7 is released.
I don’t know, guys… While resolution independence sounds cool, it would take a lot of CPU horsepower to drive it. Think about dozens (hundreds?) of icons on the screen all getting rendered on the fly. Preview (PDF) comes to mind. Let’s just say “snappy” isn’t the first thing I think of when I think about resolution independence. Besides, most of the icons on your drive represent content that’s raster, not vector…
It takes long enough to display the Applications folder, now… I can’t imagine if all that eye candy were vector-based and had to be rendered on the fly.
Talk to me in a few years down the road when even notebooks have 4 or 8 cores and have horsepower to burn. We’re not there, yet.
For now, with the GPUs we have in even basic computers handle the giant scale icons with aplomb.
Hey Zune Tongued, I tried to double click my Windows icons but all it does is play fart sounds from Ballmer. Help me.
“While resolution independence sounds cool, it would take a lot of CPU horsepower to drive it. “
@ecrabb… That’s what OpenCL (?) is all about. It harnesses the power of your Mac’s GPU (video card) to render such things and other stuff like window transparency, the cool Dashboard water splash effect, etc..
Supposedly the rewritten Finder speeds up opening Finder windows quite a bit.
So, you Snow leopard users… does it?
I never do a xx.0 system upgrade. I always wait for xx.1.
I don’t like beta testing my OS.
It’s a bit like buying and wearing clothing that has manufacturers’ logos plastered all over them….
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they should PAY ME to advertise for them! NOT the other way around.
If visible logos are removable, I’ll buy the stuff, otherwise no sale.
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