What will we see in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard? Windows Virtualization? Full Screen Applications? Don't count your chickens, but I do want to point out one subject that apparently a lot of rumor sites have overlooked: resolution independence. Now, before I go into detail, I want to clarify that this is not a rumor site, and thus this is a rare occasion of me posting anything to do with Apple rumors. I do, however, want to spell out the blatantly obvious for people.

It shouldn't be a secret that Apple quietly integrated a "Resolution Scaling" feature into 10.4 for developers. (For those who aren't aware, if you have the Developer Tools installed, simply go to Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/Quartz Debug.app). On the basis that "Apple may use a similar feature in future releases of Mac OS X," it gave us developers a chance to prepare for the vague future Apple has described to us. However, toying with the tools provided, this stuff is actually in the OS already. It showed that this "resolution independent" stuff won't necessarily be all vector. Yes, NSBezierPaths and fonts automatically scale correctly, but what about graphics? Although Apple hasn't said anything yet, it only makes sense that they would further the use of .icns files, letting you have different graphics for multiple sizes, scaling near perfectly. This is already the case with all application icons in Mac OS X.




In addition, take a look at recent posts to the Surfin' Safari blog. There have been multiple posts in the past few months regarding, surprise surprise... how to properly scale websites! And we're not just talking about good CSS manners here, these guys are talking about implementing W3C's vector-based SVG as a first-class image format in WebKit, and most likely OS X. Holy shitz. Obviously, no one is simply joking around here. This is going to happen.

One area of Web design that is going to become more important in the coming years is high DPI. For those of us working on WebKit, this will also become an issue for WebKit applications and for Dashboard widgets.
- Dave Hyatt

And finally, there's the smaller little hints that people dismissed. Some graphic designer a while ago accidently spilled the beans that they were privately contracted by Apple to make icons for the system. Except, these icons weren't 128x128px, no, they were a whopping 512x512px. I'd say that these kinds of icons would be big enough to be scaled down a fair bit.

With larger resolutions on new Macs lately, it makes sense that Apple would do something like this. Even I find myself squinting sometimes when using my 23" Cinema Display at a far distance. Mark my words, this is going to be huge - WWDC can't come soon enough.