Much like when Apple introduced the iPhone 4 with its high-pixel density “retina” display, it’s taking time for applications to take advantage of the increased clarity of the retina-equipped Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, developers don’t always provide timelines for adoption… if they update at all. But hope isn’t lost! It’s possible to force Mac apps to use retina visuals, even if they don’t support them natively.
Retinizer is the program you want. What it does is allow you to force individual apps that use Apple’s Carbon API to draw at “2x”, rather than “1x”. Note this won’t add detail where none exist, so icons, images and other raster images will remain blurry, however, fonts and native widgets — text boxes, buttons, etc — will be rendered with higher detail. It’s perfect for word processors and other text-heavy applications — take the programming IDE Eclipse, shown above. You can see Retinizer makes a massive difference.
Retinizer won’t work with everything; the developer provides the following caveats:
Cannot tell if apps are retina ready unless they have set NSHighResolutionCapable in their Info.plist.
DON’T USE IT WITH ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE
It may have problems with apps that don’t use the defaults systemYou must have Gatekeeper disabled or open the app with Ctrl-Click->Open, as I don’t (yet) have a Gatekeeper Certificate.
All in all, it’s a neat stop-gap until your favourite apps become retina-ready.
Retinizer [Official site]
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