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631 points wojtczyk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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dylan-m ◴[] No.41406819[source]
One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/.

That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.

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mrob ◴[] No.41406994[source]
>More expensive lenses have a coating to compensate for this chromatic aberration.

You can't compensate for chromatic aberration with a coating. You need a compound lens made from multiple elements each with a different dispersion, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens

More expensive glasses lenses usually have worse chromatic aberration than cheap ones. The cheapest material for glasses lenses (PADC, often called by the brand name CR-39) has one of the best Abbe numbers (measure of dispersion).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CR-39

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe_number

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1. cubefox ◴[] No.41409285[source]
I thought I got used to the color fringes in my glasses, but the real problem is that they actually reduce image clarity away from the center of the lenses. If you look e.g. at white text on a dark background from an angle, the chromatic aberration blurs (the color components of) the letters together. You can't really see clearly by moving the eyes to the edge of the FoV of your glasses; you have to turn your head instead.

This is directly contradicting the main purpose of glasses: to see clearly. So it's actually somewhat less safe to e.g. drive with glasses that have major chromatic aberration. No idea why optometrists brush it off as a minor glitch.