I was checking out a MacBookPro with Retina display a few days ago in the mall, and I noticed something:
- Photos look awesome
- Apple apps had super sharp text
- All other apps that I tried had awful looking text (Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat)
I tried running at different resolutions, but it didn't help. I did note that PDF files created in MS Word (which looked awful in MS Word) looked beautiful in Preview, so I don't think its a problem of source files.
I'm a developer, so I'll likely be using tools like Ruby Mine, Coda, Textmate, Visual Studio in Parallels, etc. I assume vim in the terminal is going to look fine, but I didn't check.
What can help with this? How can I prevent text from looking awful? It's my livelihood, so it has to work.
Note: fellow programmers.stackexchange.com user has added this comment below:
text in the Eclipse IDE and Xcode look fine. MS Word not so much.
This came from a discussion about programming on "high resolution screens" that may be of good reference to anyone reading this. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/154710/do-higher-resolution-laptop-displays-matter-for-programmers
Best Answer
Apple announced in the 2012 WWDC Keynote that applications needed to be updated to take advantage of the Retina display. Apps calling Apple text display APIs may benefit from Apple's improvements thereto without needing to be updated. Apps that use routines that had not been updated would use pixel doubling, which would make their text display using half the resolution of apps properly designed for the new machine.
Apple, naturally, has updated many of their apps, but the versions of third-party apps on the machine you tried had likely not been updated.
There is little you as an end user can do to make the programs render text better, but if you are using products from reputable vendors who update their products frequently, such updates should be released soon to take advantage of Apple's new HiDPI settings.