Spice up your Apple applications

Apple's "Professional" range of applications such as Final Cut Studio, Aperture or Logic Express have a completely different look to the standard Aqua color scheme. This comes courtesy of a private framework called ProKit.framework, intended to make Apple's professional software stand out from the crowd. And stand out it does …

[Giles Jones]

A little too dull

Apple is partly correct to make pro applications a little less distracting. But I agree, the font sizes are too hard on the eyes in places. Especially Logic Studio when running on a 22 inch widescreen (I'd hate to run 24-inch iMac resolutions!).

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason...

Don't forget that they are all that shade of grey for a damn good reason - its so that you can colour match or grade footage against a neutral background!

If you go into a professional grading suite in a Post production facility its the same colour grey..

I wouldn't be very happy to receive some footage that had been worked on against an aqua background...

[Daniel Harris]

Font size too small in pro apps!...

I'll give anybody 100 quid who will help me resize the fonts in Logic Pro independently of the graphics.

It's diabolical that Apple force such small fonts on their pro-consumers.

I have a 30" LCD and I want to be able to set my minimum font as 18 points system wide.

Geddit?!?! But Apple don't...

Cheers Daniel

[Charles Fraser-Hopewell]

I'm with AC on this.

The reason they're a "drab" gray colour is exactly as explained - to remain neutral when doing critical colour correction work.

Totally agree with Danial Harris too, the fonts in Aperture are far too small.

[Rob McDougall]

Resolution Independence

That was a very interesting article. I've not dug about in XCode before, it's been sitting on my system a long time 'cos I use Quartz Composer for some nice 3D stuff I do with live music...

To Daniel Harris, I think you won't have to wait too long to get what you want. Apple have been developing "resolution independence" for a while now, I think it's due in Snow Leopard, so your tiny fonts should look the same (hopefully not too tiny) on any monitor! Other things like the menu bar should take up precisely the same amount of space (e.g 1cm or whatever) rather than a proportion of the screen (1% of whatever resolution)... I think?

(correct me if I'm wrong!)

Mines the one with the ruler in the pocket, and no I'm not that excited to see you...!

[Martin Edwards]

Font size

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's frustrated by the tiny font! I've only used Logic on my 17" screen. I had previously wondered how users with larger monitors fared, and I thought that maybe the font scaled up automatically with increasing screen resolution. I gather from the comments that it doesn't!

[Gareth Irwin]

fiddle de dum de do.

I don't know why, I just sorta hoped this would be a link to an application to make aperture slightly more usable.

Ho hum.

[Daniel Harris]

200 quid! Join me in the pledge fund!

Rob McDougall said: "Other things like the menu bar should take up precisely the same amount of space... (correct me if I'm wrong!)"

Sorry, you are wrong resolution independence scales the whole application window and screen including text and graphics. But we don't need graphics bigger and chunkier. We just need the text to be independently sizable in relation to the graphics. And this is not the problem that resolution independence seeks to solve.

Make it 200 quid for anyone that solves this! Who will join me in the pledge?

A side note: Consider this: Nearly everybody I know is frustrated with font sizes in pro apps. Why is it so difficult to gather people's opinions into a big long list and present it to Apple? Why does the Internet not provide us with such easy to use tools? We have so far to go! ;-/

Cheers Daniel

[Dave Jewell]

Aperture Font Sizes....

Thanks for the comments guys. I take the point about the drab colour scheme being useful for colour matching, etc. All the same, my retinas suffer from 'rod fatigue' after staring at Aperture for too long.... ;-)

As regards altering the default font size in the pro apps, I've just been browsing the relevant code in the ProKit framework. I had hoped there would be some hidden defaults setting which would do the job, but the relevant point size is apparently "hard-wired" into the ProKit binary. I'm loathe to patch the binary, but keep upping the ante in the Pledge Fund, and I might go for it..... ;-))

Dave