I'm pretty excited that we finally have some beautiful Apple hardware with Retina displays so the OS X HiDPI dream is actually turning into reality.

Needless to say I'll be updating Flying Meat's apps to take advantage of this.

VoodooPad 5 already has HiDPI graphics baked into it already- for instance, the toolbar is completely ready for Retina and it looks great. There's just a handful of other places that need to be cleaned up and it's good to go.

Acorn is being "Retinafied" (@2xed? HiDPied?) for version 3.3, and this involves a bit more work because I'm just not going to update the graphics for it (that's the easy part!). Oh no- there's something a bit more awesome that's being worked on:

Acorn 3.3 will have a Retina Canvas

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What's a "Retina Canvas" you ask? Good question! A Retina Canvas is when 1 pixel equals 1 physical dot* on your hardware display, even though all the other UI elements in Acorn are redrawn @2x. Acorn 3.3 will detect and make the necessary adjustments for display and input** so that it looks freaken' awesome on your Retina MBP. And Acorn 3.3 already looking pretty rad.

So that's the plan, and I hope to have it done soon. If you've got a Retina display and would like a sneak peek- you can download a beta of Acorn 3.3 with Retina Canvas today.


*Technically 1 physical dot equals 3 little RGB slivers.

** Retinal Canvas isn't just about dividing the bounds of the canvas in half pushing the pixels through. There are lots of other things to think about such as a window moving from a regular to Retina display, doing the right thing with fonts, and getting input geometry just right.

*** Acorn 3.3 will of course be a free update if you already own any version of Acorn 3.

**** Want to see a neat Preview.app bug? Make a selection in an image and then drag it from display 1 (regular DPI) to display 2 (which is HighDPI). Your selection now disappears.
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