VMD-L Mailing List

From: Barry Isralewitz (barryi_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 30 2012 - 12:08:42 CDT

Hi,

        A good chance you already know of the following approach, FX, but for those who don't:

        Until FLTK is changed, one workaround here for a MacBook Pro with Retina Display is to temporarily place the Macbook into direct, native 2880x1800 resolution mode, using a utility like SwitchResX,
http://www.madrau.com/indexSRX4.html

        A direct 2880x1800 display on a 15-inch laptop screen renders text and menus about-unusably tiny, so it's obvious why Apple doesn't provide this option by default in Display Preferences, but this does allow an impressively-high resolution VMD session on a laptop.

        The same changes that SwitchResX carries out can be done with free utilities / from the command line, but SwitchResX has a convenient interface, can be set for automatic resolution changes when an application start/quits/becomes frontmost, and claims to help manage items on the desktop as resolution size changes (I haven't much looked into the latter two features).

        For other (free) approaches, see:
4 Ways to Run a Retina MacBook Pro at 2880×1800 Native Resolution
http://osxdaily.com/2012/06/18/3-ways-to-run-a-retina-macbook-pro-at-2880x1800-native-resolution/

        No guarantees on complete reliability for any of these approaches; double-check before presentations that all is well with projector / external monitor output.

                        Cheers,

                        Barry

On Sep 30, 2012, at 11:11 AM, John Stone wrote:

>
> Hi,
> VMD uses FLTK to open and manage the OpenGL window on the
> MacOS X platforms. To support the new retina display, the code in
> FLTK will have to be updated accordingly. Until FLTK is updated
> to support the retina display, there's not much to do on the VMD side.
> This is somewhat complicated by the fact that the retina display is
> likely not supported at all under the older Carbon APIs used by the
> previous stable revs of VMD, and so this probably also requires using
> Cocoa, and that most likely requires that we would also use the
> experimental branch of Tcl/Tk with Cocoa support. The only problem with
> that last part is that combination has already been tried, for the
> experimental 64-bit builds of VMD, and thus far it's not nearly as stable
> as the older revs of FLTK, Tcl/Tk, based on the original Carbon APIs...
> Anyway, the work to do in VMD is likely minimal, most of what is involved
> affects FLTK and getting FLTK and Tcl/Tk to cooperate well with Cocoa.
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 12:40:23PM +0200, FX wrote:
>> Dear VMD dev(s?),
>>
>> I wonder: what is the plan w.r.t. support for Apple's Retina displays (on Mac OS >= 10.7)? VMD is kind of ugly in low-res mode, and I am willing to step in and help actually transition, but I don't know what's the current status and plan.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> FX
>
> --
> NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Phone: 217-244-3349
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/ Fax: 217-244-6078 

-- 
Barry Isralewitz
Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group
3043 Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Office Phone: (217) 244-1612
email: barryi_at_ks.uiuc.edu   http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~barryi