Not too long ago I was developing a website for a client that uses a black background with white text. I noticed the white text appearing rather bold so I assumed my CSS was faulty and somewhere was a font-weight set to bold. The fact that this was only happening in all browsers on the Mac platform should have been a pointer to the issue. However, as always I question my code first but after intensive research on the CSS it turned out it had nothing to do with the code at all.

After Googling on it for a bit, the only article I found discussing this issue was by Jason Patterson on this lengthy forum topic. The forum discusses Mac OS X’s sub-pixel AA and Patterson takes the opportunity to claim there’s a bug in Mac OS X’s sub-pixel AA rendering for white/light text on black/dark backgrounds.

He also did a thorough test which you can see here.

I created my own tests, one html file for those who want to check if they experience the same issue and one screenshot of how it looked like before I changed my iMac’s default font smoothing style setting.

It’s been awhile since my last post but guess what? I’ve been busy!

Yes indeed. Apart from getting adjusted to a new country and its customs and climate, going on a 5 day trip to Bangkok I have also been keeping myself busy doing some work at home. Created a business card, put up a website for Popel and edited some of the other older sites I still maintain.

And last but certainly not least: I got an iMac!!!

And I have been playing with it ever since I unpacked and installed it. I think I have my work flow set up ready to go now. Still using Komodo Edit for XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Transferred all the important data from my old desktop PC (which typically died a few days later only to be mysteriously resurrected the day after).

So I am ready. Bring it on!