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Anti-aliased angels dancing on the head of a pin
April 28th, 2004
There’s a bit of a spat going on between Scoble The Microserf and Dudley “Haven’t Got An About Me Link On My Blog” Doe (or maybe he’s Somebody Dudley, and we’re just doing the Bloggers Thing of referring to each other by surnames only. It was months before I realised that Kottke has a first name. It’s a bit like actors calling each other “luvvie”.) The argument revolves around which anti-aliasing is better, ClearType on XP or the Mac equivalent, whatever it’s called.
Three things come to mind here.
1. This is a definitive example of a “my god is better than your god” discussion.
2. It’s irrelevant in that you can’t switch from one to the other.
3. The reason I don’t know what the Mac equivalent is called is because I’ve never had to switch it on. It’s on by default, unlike ClearType, which is part of the extensive tweaking and tuning and fiddling that one has to do post-XP install.
2 Responses to “Anti-aliased angels dancing on the head of a pin”
ClearType wasn’t enabled by default on XP because it may have caused problems with older video cards. Since you can only run Mac OS X on a Mac, Apple had no such problems because they knew exactly what hardware their users would have. Because PCs are a mongrel species, as opposed to the pedigree status that Macs have, MS has to do a balancing act between making the most of new technologies while retaining compatibility with older hardware and software.
I’ll get that “About Us” page up there soon.
You’re right though. The conversation is definitely degenerating. There’s some talk about handwriting recognition, and people obsessing about the fact that I used a JPEG instead of PNG irrespective of the fact that I kept the JPEG quality at 100%.
Anyway, my whole argument all along is that I don’t think the difference is all that remarkable. Personally, I think the font anti-aliasing looks better on the Mac. However, I use a XP 95% of the time so I’d be very happy if ClearType looked just as good.