Any Retina apps capable of multiple scaling factors (e.g. Aperture)?

[victorhooi]

Hi,

In his review of the Retina screen:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/6

Anand mentions that certain apps, like Apple Aperture are able to show the chrome, and content at different "resolutions":

Where things get really exciting is when you have an application that not only handles scaling properly, but also takes advantage of the added resolution. Take Aperture 3.3 for example. With OS X set to its “best for Retina display” mode, this is what Aperture looks like with a 2880 x 1800 image open and displayed at full size:

Here Apple is scaling the UI elements like the menus and widgets on the screen (backing scale factor = 2.0), but displaying the open image unscaled (backing scale factor = 1.0). As a result we can fit almost an entire 2880 x 1800 image on the screen without zooming out. Remember the backing scale factor isn’t global, individual elements on the screen can be scaled independently depending on their purpose.

The same thing happens when you look at applications like iMovie or Final Cut HD. The UI elements are scaled up but the video window is displayed unscaled, thus allowing us to display a full 1080p video alongside text and tools that are still legible.

This definitely sounds pretty cool.

For example, Chrome could be able to show the browser chrome at the normal 1280x800 resolution, but the actual browser content could be shown at a different scaling.

Or Pages, or SublimeText could do the same for the text content.

Does anybody know of any other apps apart from Apple Aperture that are able to do this? Is there a technical name for this feature?

Cheers,
Victor

 

[leman]

This is not about scaling factors but rather, about detecting scaling (as in HiDPI mode) and taking advantage of the underlying full-resolution surface, aka. backing store. This is most useful for image data, because it allows you to display them in more detail then possible on the normal screen if the same resolution. It's also completely trivial to implement. Preview and Puxelmator do this, Photoshop afaik also.

For text and browsers it makes much less sense. That said, editors and browsers have supported content scaling for years now - it doesn't have anything to do with retina display. just use cmd+