Categories
Archive

Smooth as You Know What: Silk, 10.1.5, and Antialiasing


Antialiased text has its die-hard aficionados, and its naysayers. For those of you who like the clean, crisp look of pixelated text, please, don’t read this article. For everyone else, Unsanity’s latest free “Haxie,” Silk, is for you. After a quick installation, no restart required, anyone running OS X 10.1.5 can apply antialiasing to Carbon apps, thanks to a new hook in the OS upgrade. The folks at Unsanity have thoughtfully designed the Preference Panel for Silk so you can drag and drop applications to find out if they’re Carbon or Cocoa-based, since only Carbon apps are affected. And there are global and application-specific options for each of the Quartz tags in 10.1.5. As Jon Gales reported for us earlier this week, Microsoft wants to change your homepage to MSN.com just so you can get text smoothing. Stick it to the Man: dump IE and enjoy the new Silk-smoothed beauty of open-sourced Mozilla with antialiasing. (And one-up Microsoft with my favorite feature, tabbed browsing — hit cmd-T once; you’ll never go back!)

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.