A few months ago I upgraded all maxprog applications to support HiDPI (aka Retina). HiDPI displays are becoming more and more popular on computers so I had no choice. It took half a year to perform the task since all the icons had to be redesigned from scratch, indeed, HiDPI requires several resolutions for every single graphic. None of the maxprog applications were prepared for that because absolutely all the icons were available at a single resolution only. Let say that maxprog applications are much older than the HiDPI technology.
At the heart of HiDPI is pixel doubling: drawing an image with twice as many physical pixels in each dimension than requested in virtual pixels. For example, an icon or image might be 16 virtual pixels tall, but on a HiDPI display, it’s drawn with 32 physical pixels.
Result is that HiDPI makes the icon twice as crisp and it makes text look much more like a physical magazine than a computer screen.
One of the biggest challenge I faced was custom controls like for example the address bar used in FTP Disk. It took days of coding and testing to get it work on HiDPI screen properly. iCash was a problem as well since it uses tons of icons of many different sizes, icons drawn in listbox rows, in contextual menus and so. Lot of designing, coding and checking.
This the list of applications and the version with HiDPI support:
– MaxBulk Mailer 8.6
– eMail Extractor 3.7
– eMail Bounce Handler 3.9
– eMail Verifier 3.7
– iCash 7.6
– Loan Calc 2.8
– Web Dumper 3.4
– FTP Disk 1.4
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Stan Busk – Software Engineer
at www.maxprog.com