As well, I would say that Apple could easily provide options to customize the look of the 2D Dock—to change the background colour and the border colour and the background transparency level. All these things can be easily done with DragThing docks, which I am using on the side of the Dock to have hierarchical access to some of my folders again. It seems to me that Apple is being too strict in enforcing the “one UI to rule them all” approach in this case. No, I do not want a million customization options, especially when they risk creating a billion differences in system configurations and all kinds of tech support headaches, but in this case it would be purely aesthetic and wouldn’t affect anything else.

The same thing goes for the menu bar. Just give people an option to turn the transparency off if they’d rather. I don’t see why they can’t provide this option.

The transparency does not bother me all that much, because I use a background picture that is actually almost uniformly grey behind the menu bar, so it does not look transparent at all. But I am still disappointed I no longer have sub-pixel font smoothing there—which, by the way, I noticed right away when I switched to Leopard, even though it wasn’t in the fully-formed thought “They removed sub-pixel anti-aliasing!” I just noticed that the menu headings were a bit different, and looked “thinner” and not right.

And I am definitely very frustrated that I still don’t have sub-pixel anti-aliasing in Pages!

On a related note, I’m a little disappointed that Apple caved in to vocal complaints about the reflective dock on the side… it’s good that they offered an alternative view, but it should have been a user-controllable option. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get the reflective dock on the side any longer, even from the terminal. I realize it doesn’t look realistic, but again, the reduction in distraction from incorporating some of the desktop image in the reflection is effective for me personally. I find the old-style dock, especially with the whitish border, too distracting on the side.

As a consequence, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for higher level compositing engines to use sub-pixel anti-aliasing as they’ll probably get a string from software, compose it into some graphic which eventually gets drawn on the screen somewhere. To use sub-pixel anti-aliasing in such a situation your compositing engine would need to guarantee that it’ll only move things by integer pixel numbers (and not transform them), _or_ the whole compositing pipeline would need to be able to keep a link to the original text renderer and request a new rendering when the position changes.

Both these things seem rather unlikely. Even Cocoa’s drawing engine has worked with floating point coordinates for a long time, _but_ it is somehow optimised for drawing bitmaps with integer coordinates. I assume that more modern graphics engines try to be more abstract and flexible and put even more distance between the text renderer and the on-screen drawing, which once you want to allow arbitrary transforms pretty much requires non-integer coordinates. Likewise I doubt that the graphics engine would be able to request updated renderings once things move. The information flow seems to be one way in those situations.

Kikujiro: Simply put, I have no idea. Sub-pixel font anti-aliasing involves technical considerations that are outside my field of expertise. It seems to me too that on-the-fly sub-pixel anti-aliasing should be possible in all contexts, but for some reason Apple chose not to do it in the menu bar heading and in iWork applications. It’s deeply frustrating not to know why or have a valid justification for this, especially for iWork applications, where it really does affect the text reading experience.

I disagree with some of the blowback, not necessarily from you, on the transparent menubar though. (Of course the subpixel antialiasing needs to be fixed!) People treat the semitransparency as if it’s some kind of useless, discretionary eye-candy, when it’s clear there is a purpose behind it… it’s part of a series of coordinated changes in Leopard to focus the eye on the active application rather than the surrounding chrome. I find myself using full screen modes in Leopard much less than I did in Tiger because the menu bar partially melts away, making it less of a distraction, and the space around the tops of the dock icons, as well as the way that the reflective dock absorbs some of the colour from the desktop background, reducing visual competition for the foreground application. The larger drop shadow and the greying of source lists in background applications also helps with this. People may disagree about how successful the semitransparency is at accomplishing Apple’s goals, but there’s no question in my mind that there were usability goals in mind. It’s not just mindless eye-candy.

But that’s the technological excuse (in my poor non-expert rephrasing). The bottom line is that yes, the font rendering is shocking, for what is supposed to be the flagship word processor! If there are technical hurdles, then these hurdles need to be overcome. It’s as simple as that. Apple’s lack of progress on that front is nothing short of scandalous. But of course it’s not the type of thing that is going to make headlines…

What really baffles me is that OSX seems perfectly capable of displaying complex/transparent text and graphics using subpixel rendering — just hit print preview for any Pages doc and Preview will happily show you how it ought to look on screen. Why can’t they do that in Pages too?