Making the case for 'Retina' support on Macs.
Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 8:40 pm
Most people don't realize, Ableton Live 8 already technically has Retina support. It's just not activated.
This is possible thanks to the fact that Live's UI is rendered as vector elements, not as raster (pixel) elements. They hide this away in the preferences under the name of "Zoom"; and for anyone familiar with Mac development, Retina support is simply the the addition of @2x resolution image assets. If we "zoom" Live's UI to 200%, we have a Retina UI. The difficulty comes in telling Live to draw at 200% under native resolution, not upscaled resolution.
Here's a screenshot of Live running on a 15" Macbook Pro, fully Retina and fully working.
http://cl.ly/image/1i372o1N353T
In order to achieve this, I used an app called ResolutionTab, which can be found on the App Store, to switch the Retina display to Native resolution of 2880x1800. I then went to Preferences and set the Zoom to 200%.
Now, of course, the surrounding OS UI, everything but the main Live window is tiny; and we'd have to use System Preferences to double our cursor size and cursor speed. This is purely a proof-of-concept that anyone can follow along with to demonstrate that Retina support is possible in Live, we merely need to convince Ableton to implement this 200% zoom on Retina Macs.
This is possible thanks to the fact that Live's UI is rendered as vector elements, not as raster (pixel) elements. They hide this away in the preferences under the name of "Zoom"; and for anyone familiar with Mac development, Retina support is simply the the addition of @2x resolution image assets. If we "zoom" Live's UI to 200%, we have a Retina UI. The difficulty comes in telling Live to draw at 200% under native resolution, not upscaled resolution.
Here's a screenshot of Live running on a 15" Macbook Pro, fully Retina and fully working.
http://cl.ly/image/1i372o1N353T
In order to achieve this, I used an app called ResolutionTab, which can be found on the App Store, to switch the Retina display to Native resolution of 2880x1800. I then went to Preferences and set the Zoom to 200%.
Now, of course, the surrounding OS UI, everything but the main Live window is tiny; and we'd have to use System Preferences to double our cursor size and cursor speed. This is purely a proof-of-concept that anyone can follow along with to demonstrate that Retina support is possible in Live, we merely need to convince Ableton to implement this 200% zoom on Retina Macs.