MacBook Pro 17" HI-RES

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I'm going to buy a MacBook Pro 17" and I'm stuck on the following dilemma: should I buy the hi-resolution version or not?
I'm just afraid that interface elements (menus, windows, palettes) would be too small on it.

Is there anyone who can share their experience with hi-res MacBook Pros?

[Dwight]

What is your age and your eyeglasses?

[Erich]

I would get it (in fact I did) and not worry too much about menus being too small. There are a number of ways to deal with this should it prove problematic.

First, if your menus are too small you can always bump your screen size down.

Second, if you just need to temporarily zoom in to see an item hit control and scroll with the track pad or mouse. Provided you have the zoom turned on in the Universal Access control panel, this will enlarge what ever area of the screen your pointer is currently located in.

HTH

[owen]

Get it .. its fine and you can always reduce the res if you have problems

it also has the advantage of being able attach 1920x1200 monitors like the 23" Apple or Dell 20"-27" without having to rearrange all your palletes every time as you do with the 1680x1050

[Anonymous]

MacOS will be resolution-independent soon, so menus will probably get bigger in the future. However I'm quite worried about ArchiCAD palettes. They have very small font sizes. Are you able to enter, say, a line length without zooming on the palette? I'm afraid that with a hi-res screen those numbers would get unreadable!

[Rex Maximilian]

owen wrote:
Get it .. its fine and you can always reduce the res if you have problems

it also has the advantage of being able attach 1920x1200 monitors like the 23" Apple or Dell 20"-27" without having to rearrange all your palletes every time as you do with the 1680x1050

I set up Palette Schemes in the Work Environment for the different monitor configurations I have so I never have to rearrange when going with a solo monitor or dual monitors.

[Anonymous]

Sound wrote:
MacOS will be resolution-independent soon

Hi Sound,

If your using OS X 3.9 and QT 6.5.2+ with a Quartz Extreme supported graphics card it already is. Everything you see is OpenGL. The one snafu is for those who select anything to render as "Full Quality" as that is what you get. Full Quality is the highest quality the computer can display. You want to avoid this as you will be struggling with image quality issues especially if you are using a laptop or only have a small display connected during the render.

Unlike the days of old when you just selected a larger display in preferences while rendering the OS uses multiple virtual displays and you are limited only by the size of the OpenGL texture supported by the GC which for many "normal" cards this is 2048 in any direction.

If your goal is a higher resolution than the connected display supports never select "Full Quality" anything. Full quality is up to 1920x1080 depending on the connected display. i.e selecting Full Quality 1920 x 1080 on a 15" MBP will get you an image of 1440 x 878 (900-menu).

As a MBP 2,2 (ATY, RadeonX1600 256MB VRAM) user I am limited to 2048 x 2048 for rendering to a file but could never display the entire content on my machine as it exceeds "full" quality. My GC can actually support 2056 x 1600 physical display but the OpenGL texture is limited to 2048 in any direction.

You should be able to change the default size of the menus and tool bars via the command line or a property list editor (easier). I have not tried this with AC but have done so to get rid of the menus and pallets in some other apps.

defaults read com.graphisoft.ArchiCAD will show some of the defaults but menus and tool pallets may have their own property lists. Maybe someone here knows where.

Jeffrey