Snow Leopard’s Beautiful, Giant, Obsessive Icons

Pete Mortensen ()

folder

One of the more, um, INTERESTING, design choices in Snow Leopard is the option to show icons in the new Cocoa-based Finder at an insane 512×512 pixels. Here’s how big that is: on a unibody 13.3” MacBook Pro, you can display exactly two of them without either overlapping or running off the screen. The 30” Cinema HD Display can only display 15 of them, and it’s significantly higher resolution than a 1080p television. The original Mac, at 512X342 pixels, could only display the width in full.

They’re enormous, and only possibly practical if you want to read documents without opening them, in which case Quick Look is a way better option anyway. Regardless, the new high-definition icons are fascinating viewed at full size. I’ve put in just the Folder icon, which is now big enough to have discernable flecks of dark blue in the grain. Amazing. Totally obsessive. And totally Apple.

The Register has more. Check them out.

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About the author

Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

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Posted in Apple, Software |

  • Pete Mayhem

    It doesn’t make perfect sense if you are working with folders, but it starts to make a lot of sense of you are browsing high resolution pictures or video files as thumbnailed previews. I imagine SL just didn’t want to compromise its icns quality for larger sizes…

  • Lucas

    well i know my blind as a bat grandmother will love it. she says the icons aren’t bigger enough on leopard

  • Jack

    They’ve been like this for quite some time.

  • John

    Leopard has 512×512 icons… Granted you can really only see them using cover flow, but they are there.

  • Peter Kennedy

    Personally, file folders cannot be big enough for me.

    And I use Google Quick Search Box to open my files/apps.

  • Louis Wheeler

    What? No one told you? Boy, are you out of the loop. LOL

    Apple has been moving toward Resolution Independence since Mac OSX 10.3, but it hasn’t been making a big deal of it. It will be interesting to see what Snow Leopard adds to this process.

    Before Apple could make Resolution Independence happen, it had to patiently place many ducks in a row. What this meant was that Apple has been making it easier and easier for developers to create code that doesn’t care what the screen resolution is. The operating system controls that.

    This was necessary before Apple could start selling monitors using 163 dots per inch which is the same resolution as the iPhone. Other resolutions leap out at us. 72 dots per inch is Apple’s current standard, 150 DPI is 2X that, 220 DPI is 3X and 300 DPI is 4X.

    What this means that you will eventually be allowed to select the refresh rate and the DPI that best utilizes your screen resolution and application.

    The current problem with having a higher screen resolution is the text size and the icons get so tiny that they are unreadable. The larger icons will take of that. Fonts will become much finer. No more jagged edges in fonts. Yea!

    You will have a single control in system preferences. Move the slider and all your fonts and icons change in accord.

  • CaryMG

    The icons!
    They very pretty!
    UGH!

  • johannes

    Hey folks,
    you do’nt get it! This is the preparation for the iTablet with a new, cover-flow-dock-pseudo-3d-style user interface needing BIG icons for the multitouch interface! Coming soon in 2010 …

  • http://www.cyclelogicpress.com Partners in Grime

    Some really beautiful icons out there! Check out your Applications folder in Cover Flow.

  • http://blog.tice.de/?sprache=englisch Tice

    If you are interested, here are nearly all the Icons as huge PNGs: http://blog.tice.de/icons.php?sprache=englisch

  • Tycho

    They’re pretty, and I appreciate the attention to detail immensely. But what I’d really like to see is icon independent scaling. In the current situation, because all icons are the same size, there is no hierarchy even though most of the time, not all files or folders are of the same importance (which is often compensated for with different icon designs and colours). But if you could independently scale icons, you could make the important ones stand out. A very important advantage is that not only you’ll be able to more quickly spot the correct icons, but because it is of a bigger size you’d also be able to more quickly position the cursor above it (Fitts’s law).

  • Brian

    Nothing new here, we could do this since leopard.