Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac updated for Retina Display | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac updated for Retina Display

retinamacapps.com

52 pointswells-riley14 comments

It's not fully retina. Most of it is, to give credit where credit is due, but it falls short of a 10/10 stars.

The icons within the ribbon bar bar are very hit or miss. If you're on a Retina device, here are some screenshots to illustrate:

http://cl.ly/image/2R2i420N2S2o http://cl.ly/image/1k3w2O2u2D23 http://cl.ly/image/0P2U0u1p451k http://cl.ly/image/0v1u1D3d3W40

In contrast, the main toolbar looks great:

http://cl.ly/image/071q3r3l3i30

I also had the same issue as a number of other people where the app did not launch in Retina mode the first time around, and needed to touch the *.app files to make it happen.

Obviously, MS Office is a huge suite with an enormous number of resources. It's no mean feat, and just getting the basics up to retina is a great accomplishment. Personally, I'm just glad to have the editor in retina - I'd been opening Word documents in Pages for months now. Especially when you consider that some of these images probably come as-is from the Windows team and they may not even have access to them in higher resolution, I guess I can completely sympathize with the current implementation.

It initially didn't fix the resolution issue for me. The trick, according to MacRumours, is to touch the .app files. A Mac caching issue. E.g. "touch /Applications/Microsoft Office/Microsoft\ Word.app"

see http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1446182&pag...

Smart move by the Office for Mac team getting this out in a timely manner. Wouldn't it be nice if the other teams at Microsoft pushed updates and features just as quickly?

Now Adobe just needs to get their game together. The Creative Suite are exactly the type of applications used by early adopting Mac users that could use a retina display.

Agreed. Apps like Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, and AfterEffects would be amazing with Retina compatibility.

I think everyone is anxiously awaiting an updated Photoshop, but I'm just not sure how they'd do it. I've been thinking about it for a few weeks, but it's a pretty major problem. Ps is all about mapping an image to exact pixels, but that's not practical on a Retina display. A 1x image would appear too small (or pixelated, just as it is now, at 200%), and 2x images would be too small at 100% (Retina actual size) to do pixel perfect detail work.

Maybe there's an obvious solution I'm overlooking.

I use Photoshop mainly for front-end web dev. The most common use of it is just slicing up images to be used, having it work on a retina display would be great. It's so common for cutlines to become blurry the more you zoom out on an image, so I think that having it be 1 to 1 pixel density is a must have. I don't believe that since the pixel density is higher in the images, that the actual controls can't be retina friendly. Isn't that how Final Cut works on a Retina Display? I don't have either, but I remember Apple stating "In this window, you are seeing a full un-altered 1080p frame, along with the controls"

>The most common use of it

I'm sure you meant this, but I wanted to clarify that (I assume) you meant your most common use case.

Yes, my most common use. I realize that Photoshop is an extremely powerful program, but if Adobe releases their next version with the option to display the image in a "fine detail mode" it would be a huge help for how I, and I'm sure how a lot of front-end developers use it.

When you need pixel precision, you generally would zoom beyond 100% on non-retina displays. The only thing that happens with retina photoshop is that at you need to zoom in farther to get the same detail. There is a potential problem for people designing for non-retina screens, as it would appear lower quality on the actual device; But this could be worked around with existing pixilation tools, or a more general option of rendering the image at a given pixel density relative to the display.

What teams inside MS do you think are dragging their feet?

Article links:

(Cult of Mac) http://www.cultofmac.com/191671/office-for-mac-2011-finally-...

(Microsoft) http://blog.officeformac.com/retina-display-support-is-here-...

Cool.. now if they would just update their product page to match :)

Gee, I wish Microsoft would fix the innumerable bugs associated with Mac Office Outlook & Word before getting all excited about retina displays.

Too bad the remote desktop tool that comes with office is still pixel doubled, the win8 engine looks great in hidpi under fusion.

I find it loads a lot faster now.

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