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FEATURE

HiDPI is Here!

Supporting Retina applications with Xojo

Issue: 14.3 (May/June 2016)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 15,490
Starting Page Number: 34
Article Number: 14306
Resource File(s):

14306project.zip Updated: 2016-05-02 11:15:55

Related Web Link(s):

http://blog.xojo.com/a-journey-of-a-thousand-pixels
http://blog.xojo.com/advanced-retina/hidpi-bitmapforcaching-and-scalefactorchanged

Excerpt of article text...

Finally I can look at the Xojo IDE again. Just kidding. It was never that bad, but there were times I really noticed the IDE looked low-resolution and fuzzy on my Retina Mac. But with 2016r1, the Xojo IDE finally supports high-resolution displays!

But 2016r1 is about more than just the IDE. Native Retina support means we can do without a lot of the clunky workarounds to support HiDPI displays in our apps.

At its most basic, this means you simply need to toggle the HiDPI switch in the build settings of your app (see Figure 1). This is much easier than copying in a build script into every project, though the end effect is pretty much the same. (If you already have a script in an existing script, it doesn't seem to do any harm, but you might as well remove it.)

Turning on HiDPI will enable high-resolution for most items in your application: all controls and text will automatically be rendered at the highest quality the display supports. For many apps, that may be all you need and your work is done. However, if you include your own graphics in the app, you have more to do.

A Quick Retina Primer

Before I get too in-depth into R1's new Retina support, let me give you a quick overview of what Retina (or HiDPI means). If you already know this, you can skip to the next section.

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