As a long-time fan of high DPI displays the main reason I bought this laptop is the 220 DPI 2880x1800 15” IPS display. If Dell or Samsung or anyone else had either a laptop or external monitor with a similar display it would also have been in my must-buy list.

This machine rocks and Apple deserves a lot of credit for the engineering and design trade-offs that almost perfectly suit my preferences. I use alternative operating systems on occasion to gain perspective, but for daily use wanted to use Windows 8. Currently I’m using the laptop as a desktop replacement, relegating my big and heavy dual hex-core hyper-threaded Xeon tower with a Dell 3007WFP-HC monitor to a spare room, where I can TS in or use locally when I want to use software such as Lightwave, which can use that parallelization for rendering. When at home the laptop drives a secondary 2560x1440 27” display with no problem.

That said, this is not yet a configuration ready for unsuspecting users. You don’t need a technical background but you have to be willing to accept application-specific quirks, and squint when an application or plugin shows UI that is hard-coded to 96 DPI. 

Installation

Several of the issues people are having with Windows 8 under Boot Camp appear to be related to upgrading a previous Windows 7 Boot Camp install. I strongly recommend removing the previous Boot Camp partition in OS X and doing a clean install of Windows 8. Early on some drivers, including the video driver, didn’t work under Windows 8, but now they do.

The procedure is the same as with Windows 7: point Boot Camp at the Windows 8 ISO and let it create a USB stick to boot from. Boot with that USB drive and, after Windows is installed, launch the secondary driver installers from WindowsSupport folder on the USB drive.

Configuration

By default Boot Camp will configure Windows to use 144 DPI. This is a good default because it strikes a balance between making UI elements large enough to be usable, while still staying within the “supported” realm of mainstream Windows software. By this, what I mean is that up until recently (at least at Microsoft) it was a given to make sure applications worked well at 125% and 150% DPI scaling, but 200% scaling has been less tested and is also less likely to have icons and other art that natively scales to that setting.

For reasonably advanced users I recommend enabling “Use Windows XP style scaling” under the “Custom sizing options”. This prevents the OS from using the DWM to use bitmap stretching on the application to make everything bigger at the expense of quality.

If you choose XP style scaling applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom will no longer be scaled and blurry, but the controls will be small since they were designed for 96 DPI. For me this is a worthy trade-off because I want to work with the content at native resolution, where it’s as sharp as possible, and I also enjoy the enhanced screen real-estate. Still, be prepared to lean in and/or squint sometimes until these applications are updated to be more DPI-aware. I’m not holding my breath.

For Internet Explorer 10 I bump the zoom factor to 200% (192 DPI) for most casual web surfing. This gives a very comfortable text size while eliminating wasted space. Text is incredibly sharp, well-defined, and readable. There is no longer any concern over respecting the font vs. respecting the pixel grid. Images look blurry in comparison, but unlike at ~120 DPI it’s an acceptable trade-off, and they don’t look worse than they would if I were running at a lower resolution. Notable exceptions are mapping sites such as http://maps.bing.com, where it would be really nice if they used the requisite tricks to serve up the tiles in a high-DPI friendly way.

What Works

Almost everything works, unlike what I see stated in other blog postings and articles about Windows 8 on this machine. With a normal clean install using Boot Camp the following works as expected:

• NVIDIA Video driver, including DirectX games and OpenGL applications
• Touchpad, including two-finger right-click and two-finger scrolling, both vertically and horizontally. The latter is nice for Windows 8 applications.
• Brightness, volume control, keyboard backlight, and other function keys.
• Displayport, USB3, Bluetooth (tested with Microsoft Bluetooth mouse only)
• Sleep, hibernate

Unknown

• Built-in webcam. A driver was installed but I haven’t had an opportunity to try this.

Known Issues

• On battery IE10 scrolling is sluggish. The workaround is to either use the “High Performance” power option or temporarily turn off hardware acceleration through the Advanced tab in Internet Options. This appears to be a video driver issue.
• As with previous versions of Boot Camp switchable graphics are not supported, so the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M will always be used. This reduces battery life compared to OS X.
• Accessing features such as “Restart in OS X” through the Boot Camp taskbar icon gives an error message such as “An error occurred while trying to access the startup disk settings”, even after the UAC prompt. To restart in OS X just reboot and hold down the Option key while on the initial white screen.
• Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet adapter sometimes not recognized until after a reboot. However, I’ve also encountered this OS X. Not a big deal for me since I use wireless 99% of the time.

Tips

• fn+up: page-up; fn+down = page-down; fn+left = home; fn+right = end
• fn+delete: “delete my file please”, etc.; this key has a weird overload with backspace
• fn+F1-12: invoke the actual function key

Cinebench

• Open GL: 40.71 FPS
• CPU: 5.93

As a graphics enthusiast and a proponent of vector graphics (and fonts, and resolution independent UI in general) over the years I'm thrilled to have moved over to the Trident side of IE last year, focusing on Web Graphics. Specifically, I'm working with a bunch of great people to implement support for hardware-accelerated SVG in IE.

The IE Platform Preview gives a taste of what will be supported, but is by no means complete; it's essentially a snapshot of where we were at a certain point in time. This TechRadar article and the following table from Ars Technica's article give a good overview of the level of support that's been announced, and why. I won't elaborate on the what's and why's here, since I'm just a developer, though I will say that at around 800 printed pages the SVG spec is huge. :-)

We're always looking for interesting uses of SVG on the web as well as applications that support or output SVG, so if you know any good ones leave a comment below or send me a message. (I'm particularly interested in highly interactive SVG -- stuff that goes beyond static clip-art style drawings.)

And now back to coding!

- Tony Schreiner

This application (which will remain nameless) had an alarm clock feature and the problem was that when you set the alarm on XP it would hang. After of slogging through retail assembly code for a while I finally found that whenever you set an alarm they would use SetTimeZoneInformation to temporarily change the system's time zone as part of an internal calculation, and then call it again to change it back. From the user's point of view it was fast enough that you never noticed.

That by itself wouldn't cause a hang. What caused the hang is that they also handled the WM_TIMECHANGE message, ostensibly to update the alarm if there was a system time or time zone change. While handling this message they called SetTimeZoneInformation to do their computation, which on XP caused the WM_TIMECHANGE notification to be sent again, leading to an asynchronous infinite loop.

The fix was to add a shim as part of the application compatibility functionality in Windows (from XP on, I believe), which provides a way to implement per-application compatibility workarounds without polluting the core Windows code base. The shim simply detected that a WM_TIMECHANGE was triggered by a call to SetTimeZoneInformation for this application and blocked the subsequent WM_TIMECHANGE notification.

The sample on the site is a 4+ GigaPixel image of Squamish Wall in Canada. According to the site this image was made using 800 images from a Canon 1DS Mark II, with a 100-400mm lens. The linked images such as this 360-degree panoramic view of Yosemite are also very impressive. If you have a fast machine notice how smoothly it adjusts the perspective in real-time as you go from being totally immersed in the 360-degree view to zooming out all the way.

But best of all, you can create your own! As an experiment I took a (very) random image from a visit to Rosarito, Mexico earlier this year and ran the hdmake.exe tool on it. It's not a GigaPixel panoramic so it's not as much fun, but even for normal photos I like the potential for sites such as Flickr: rather than clicking through several thumbnails of ever-increasing sizes until you get something that fills the monitor or you can see the detail, do it dynamically. Click here to see the image. Note that you'll need to accept the ActiveX control for HD View.

For some reason I couldn't get the tool to generate the XML (the errors aren't very descriptive), but it was easy enough to author manually:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<root>
  <imageset
    url="tiles/l_{l}/c_{c}/tile_{r}.wdp"
    levels="5"
    width="3456"
    height="2304"
    projection="perspective"
    thetaMin="0"
    thetaMax="0"
    phiMin="0"
    phiMax="0"
    rollPitchYaw="0 0 0"
    maxZoom="2"
  />
</root>

Now to go make some panoramas! :-)

IE7 does not support specifying multiple URLs on the command line, but another way to do this is to use IE Automation to launch IE as an out-of-proc COM server and then call methods such as IWebBrowser2::Navigate2. While you can do this using C++ or any language that supports COM, the easiest is to use Windows Scripting Host.

First, create a 'lanuchie.js' file using your favorite text editor, add the following, and save:

var navOpenInBackgroundTab = 0x1000;
var oIE = new ActiveXObject("InternetExplorer.Application");
oIE.Navigate2("http://blogs.msdn.com");
oIE.Navigate2("http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr", navOpenInBackgroundTab);
oIE.Navigate2("http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing", navOpenInBackgroundTab);
oIE.Navigate2("http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert", navOpenInBackgroundTab);
oIE.Visible = true;

Now from the command line you can do:

wscript.exe launchie.js

to open IE, navigate the first tab, and then open three background tabs.

One caveat: due to some IE features such as Protected Mode you will sometimes observe that the links are opened in an existing IE window.

I tend to blog in bursts, with the prerequisite that I have ideas and I'm not suffering from writer's block. These days I have a list of at least a dozen topics queued up -- not including a bunch of overdue in-depth posts about IE7's tabbed browsing architecture -- so I just need to get to it, I guess.

Since you asked, other great blogs you should read are Coding Horror, Eric.Weblog(), and Fabulous Adventures in Coding.

However, a couple users have noticed a similar problem that even affects IE6 and other applications, so I thought I'd throw the question out there to see if anybody else knows the answer:

"I have been having the exact same problem for the last week with IE6. Like Jan above I do not have the "Handwriting Recognition" or "On-Screen Standard Keyboard" options under the "Details" tab. But I think this is greater than an IE problem because I get the menu flickering on all drop-downs in Windows. I just upgraded to IE7 and the problem remains. I cannot use my browser anymore and will have to change if there is no real fix. Any other ideas??"

(emphasis mine)

Any ideas?

They seem to be missing the point. How could it possibly be better to upload a 5-10 megapixel image to a site (which can take several minutes per image even on a very fast connection, as upload speed is usually constrained much more than download speed), have the server resize it, and then download the resized image be better than using a client-side application to resize the image almost instantly, and with full interaction and nearly instant undo? Also, how can these sites afford the bandwidth costs?

Is this a usability issue, or has the world simply gone mad? :-)