FlexibleFactory

After saying yesterday that Silverlight 3 has Cleartype, I must now point out that while this is true, after looking at a few samples today, as well as this font rendering comparison, the quality of rendering is not on a par with the standard Windows Cleartype that we are used to. (winforms text in the link above)

This is really disappointing. While its a significant improvement over 2.0, it still has that fuzzy, projected look to it, that to me, and others makes applications feel ‘foreign’ or even ‘fake.’

In the Flash world, we suffered terrible text rendering until the introduction of Saffron a few years ago, which is actually rather good, and although not native, has a crisp and even feel to it.

I honestly think that the lack of native widgets and text rendering has been a major barrier to the psychological acceptance of Flash/Silverlight/Java based applications as ‘real’. Remember the clunky old Swing components, and how they made you feel that ‘this is not the real thing’.

Of course, if it’s even better than ‘the real thing’ that’s great, but the difficulty of achieving this with a one-size fits all approach should not be underestimated.

As children, we learn to distinguish toys from real tools by their appearance, and this may account for the lack of credibility that non-native (looking) applications have. An enormous effort has been made to get native UI into Java, so I can’t be the only one who thinks this. However, I certainly don’t agree with Jeff’s preference for IE7, a program that, to me, is an abomination, and only exists to test the patience of web developers.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 2:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.