Translucency in iOS and Mac OS X 10.10
When Apple introduced the massively blurred translucency in iOS 7 I already was skeptical weather that vast amount of number crunch is really worth anything. Wasted for some background effect. Just making everything less snappy and wasting battery life.
Now Apple extends this blurry transparency to Mac OS X 10.10 -Yosemite- (a really bad name to pronounce internationally btw.), and also letting Apps like iPhoto scroll the view content, blurred under the window’s title- and toolbar.
I recently got a pretty fast 15″ rMBP w/ Nvidia GPU to drive my 4k display at work. Of course OS X -10.9 and such- is super snappy on that. Now guess what? The current Mac OS X 10.10 beta with this blurred, transparent windows makes them all bit sloppy to drag around over the screen. This flat UI would normally be a snap to draw for the GPU. No gradients to compute, or bitmaps to blit, … just solid fills. But no, just waste all the GPU power while at it :-/!
Planned obsolescence at it’s best. For nothing. Well, except blurry background content.
You can go ahead and google Gausian blur, and do the calculations of operations required for it. Not to forget the massive radius Apple must be using for this, …
There would be some optimization possibilities, such as not using each pixel, only every 4th or 8th for this blurry madness, though, …
