A Tutorial on Resolution

Those ppi numbers are really just guidelines. What is important is how many pixels of the image are projected onto a given area of your eye’s retina. In other words, if a 6-inch-wide, 150ppi photo looks OK to you when viewed from a distance of one foot, then if the photo is enlarged by a factor of a hundred (so it’s 600 inches—50 feet—wide, and has all of 1.5ppi), and is viewed from a hundred feet away, then it will look just the same to you, because the two images will be the same size on your retina.

So, bottom line, if those “enormous banners and billboards” are never going to be viewed close up, then making them from a “150ppi” source image may be perfectly fine.

—Isaac Wingfield

MacMuser: The Lion Wores

Agnetha speaking in English with a Swedish accent, man, that would be hot.

—Steve

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Actually, you can still have a Swedish or German speech synthesizer speak English, and it will indeed have an accent. Although the accent will be pretty heavy. I think an accent slider control would be awesome.

—Mark Medonis

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I only know English. Which new Lion voices would work best for me? I am glad that the voices are being upgraded. I thought some of the voices were funny, but not practical for reading. I am a blind user, and I use Allix for reading.

—Edwin Yakubowski

MacMuser: New Vistas on Lion

Take a look at the open source SheepShaver. It emulates a PowerPC, and it lets you run Mac OS 7.5.3 through 9.0.4 on a bunch of systems, including Snow Leopard and even Windows and Linux. It’s not perfect: installing it is a little bit quirky, and I don’t know if your bar code scanners will work, but it does a lot of things well. Definitely worth a try. Installation instructions are at emaculation.com.

—Biff

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Ahhh, the old “How much do I need this?” question. I haven’t yet gone beyond Mac OS X 10.4.11, partly because my main desktop machine, a sturdy used G4 AGP, has just refused to die.

—Avery Ray Colter

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