Is it possible to have a pre-retina Application have good retina text. As in MenuBar text, and textbox and textfields and other text locations as long as the original developer used native OS X text handling API's.
For applications that do their own graphics and text rendering we know that there is a difference when trying to run on a Retina display as noted by the MacBook Pro Retina Display Analysis (see AnandTech comparison picture below).
The example of Non-retina Google Chrome vs Safari is noted to be a worse case caused by Google doing their own thing for rending text / graphics in the Application. Does this imply that if your not doing your own text rendering you get retina text for free?
Best Answer
Applications using standard Cocoa APIs should get retina text for free.
This was the same way it was released with the iPhone 4 in iOS. If you used standard UIKit, you basically got it all for free, and just had to update resources, etc.
So, with a Retina MBP as of right now, many apps need to add @2X resources (for things like images, etc), but otherwise standard applications should render all other content as retina.