Only very recently. Like, all that old Aqua stuff wasn't vectors, it was done in Photoshop.
Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px.
> Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front.
yes, but that alone doesn't require that bitmap graphics be used.
> With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px.
only if your renderer or your artwork isn't done correctly; inkscape used to be notorious for floating point rounding errors showing up with very few manipulations of a shape.
it's also been very easy to very quickly rasterize vector graphics for some time. maybe not fast enough in the past I guess, but computers are certainly fast enough now.
I look forward to a time when UIs are just all vector all the time, and it's the monitor itself which rasterizes, thanks to a program that the attached device uploads as it boots up or as the monitor is connected.
it's going to get more and more difficult to continue increasing display resolutions and refresh rates over long inexpensive cables if we continue to rasterize on a computer and push raw pixels to the display device.
