High-res nonsense in Vista (IE8 update)

Now that I have a cool 2560x1600 monitor, a dream for anybody who wants to read Corona_Coder's comments with director's commentary, I've noticed that Vista behaviour sucks on such high-resolutions.

• every time I log-in I'm welcomed by an awfully-scaled rotating blue circle shown next to the "Logging on" message on the logon screen.
• the start menu bar Orb isn't scaled correctly (it's smaller)
  
• the sidebar gadgets aren't magnified (like all the other applications) making them unreadable
  
• IE7 zoom is extremely buggy (with such high DPI) and not even www.google.com renders fine (the text of the radioboxes overlaps). Firefox has similar problems and only Opera is capable of doing almost perfect zooming. IE8 beta seems to have addressed this issue.
  
• There are certain windows message boxes (for example the one telling you "you must reboot in order to apply settings") that overflow vertically and look very ugly.
• the classic theme is completely screwed up and unusable

so much for "resolution independence": the so-called Vista (meaning "look","sight") doesn't look fine in high-resolution? oh, the irony!

BONUS whining: it looks like MS was such in a hurry to improve the audio/video stack that they forgot putting back the Codec properties pane for setting codecs priority: now there's no way for me to use the AVIVO-accelerated codecs of my ATI card

Yep, I run at 120 DPI and there's many visual bugs.  Fire the shell team.

Yeah, once i've tried 120dpi on Vista... It was funny...

DigitalDud wrote:

Yep, I run at 120 DPI and there's many visual bugs.  Fire the shell team.

Not until they fix it and all the other unfinished UI for Windows 7. And I hope some new UX design team doesn't decide to mark thier territory by redesinging all the "core experiences" yet again instead of finishing what has already been started.

DigitalDud wrote:

Yep, I run at 120 DPI and there's many visual bugs.  Fire the shell team.

Seconded.

However one thing to note in Windows Vista, using higher DPIs is actually usuable unlike Windows XP, which was ten times worse.

The problem isn't the shell team it's the fundamental nature of changing DPI.

The text gets larger and the graphics get smaller. So as a programmer you're faced with one of several solutions, none of which work well:

1.  Scale your graphics up so that they still fit in the interface with the new larger text. This is twice the scale because the image shrunk and the text got larger. looks like crazy.
2.  Include larger images and use those. (increases the size of your application hugely, and Windows still doesn't handle this nicely...
3.  Shrink the text down, which defeats the purpose of large DPI.

In any case, the size of forms have to be manually resized because it won't work right otherwise (there are major bugs with auto-scale)

Hence there is no easy solution.  The sort of solution with WPF is to use vector graphics which side steps the issue, but doesn't really solve it.

So you will have a horrible experience using high dpi settings... so just go back to small fonts and life will be fine...

John Galt wrote:



So you will have a horrible experience using high dpi settings... so just go back to small fonts and life will be fine...

unless you use a monitor with a very high res like the dell 3007wfp, the apple cinema display, etc where the pixel density is much higher compared to other monitors: in that case text at normal size looks almost unreadable.

Vista scales almost any application window fine: the problem is that MS's own programs (IE7, SideBar) don't support higher DPIs correctly.

they'd better start fixing those problems soon because with price of large screens dropping dramatically in the next years more and more people will start noticing those issues.

I'm working with 120 dpi on a 24" desktop and a 12" HP notebook and it worked very good but not perfect. The whole system is scaled correctly except the icons in the taskbar buttons. Start orb looks perfect, IE7 works great, log-on screen looks like expected. Only the Sidebar does not scale.

update: IE8 supports DPI scaling even in IE7 emulation mode. glad to see this problem solved, it was time!

now only the sidebar is missing (not considering other UI issues that probably will never be fixed)

Yes, I am very glad to see that fixed in IE8, now, if a patch could also fix also the scaling problem in Windows...

update 2: I just opened the sidebar to see if anything changed with IE8 installed and I found out all the widgets are screwed up. the widgets' contents are zoomed but the frame size remains the same so only a part of the widget is displayed.

now there are no excuses for MS not to fix the sidebar scaling