Retinizer

Retinizer is a small app I wrote that allows apps that aren’t retina ready and are displayed pixelated at 1x to display their UI widgets at 2x. That way, only their custom images will look bad and not the whole app.

To use the app, just drag an app (and make sure it’s closed) into the window and click the Retinize! button.

It also allows de-retinization of an app, in case it has problems in 2x mode. Just drag an app that you retinized before and click the button below, which will now read De-retinize. 

The app works per-user. That means, retinizing an app in your account will not affect the app in other accounts, where it will display at its usual 1x.

So far, it seems only apps that use Carbon, directly (like Snes9x) or indirectly (wxWidgets, Qt apps) draw their widgets at 1x on a retina display, while Cocoa apps seem to alwas draw widgets at 2x. But some apps, such as Eclipse, draw at 1x and use Cocoa (albeit with some weird Java bindings or something like that, not sure). This app also helps in that case. 

Please note that this app won’t make apps get retina images. That means, custom icons in e.g. the Preferences window will still look ugly.

It has only been tested with 10.8 but should work fine with 10.7.4.

Known bugs:

• 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 system

You must have Gatekeeper disabled or open the app with Ctrl-Click->Open, as I don’t (yet) have a Gatekeeper Certificate.

Eclipse@1x and Eclipse@2x – Text looks crisper, native Mac widgets look nicer.

Word@1x and Word@2x – I can't believe Microsoft hasn't updated Word yet.

Snes9x@1x and Snes9x@2x (Preferences window) - Snes9x is a Carbon app and Retinizer fixes its widgets. Retinizer can’t help its hideous low-res icon though. And please note this will not make games look better!

KeePassX@1x and KeePassX@2x - KeePassX is a Qt app. As you can see, icons still look bad.

Diablo III Launcher@1x and @2x - This is a good example on what kind of apps Retinizer doesn’t help much at all. Only some of the text got crisper, but the app’s heavy on art assets. And don’t even try it on the actual game.

(Btw, you can’t drag the Diablo III Launcher.app [com.blizzard.bootstrapper] to Retinizer as it actually launches another app with a different [net.battle.client] app identifier)

You can email questions and bugs to retinizer@mikelpr.com