IKImageBrowserView on retina screen

Question

Has anyone successfully used an IKImageBrowserView with a Retina Mac? What I get is that the image size is wildly misinterpreted. Previously I was using CGImage images which don't have a logical size, so it makes sense that the browser can't draw the at the right size. However, I've switched to NSImage, created using -initWithCGImage:size: and that still doesn't work right.

My images are 244x184 pixels and should be drawn at a logical size of 122x92. When passing 122x92 as the size, they are drawn way too large, at about 180 pixels wide. If I pass exactly half this, 61x46, the size is correct, but the image looks downscaled and not sharp. If I pass 122x92 and run with NSHighResolutionCapable set to NO in Info.plist, everything works well.

My conclusion is that IKImageBrowserView is not Retina compatible even with the 10.10 SDK on a Retina MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11. Or am I missing something? Any pointers would be appreciated!

Testimonial

Answer 1

I discovered that I wasn't really thinking the right way. The browser is supposed to always scale its images, so that's why the Retina-sized images ended up larger. I just subclassed the browser to be able to use a custom cell and customize the image frame per cell. There are however some subtle bugs in the browser that cause it to scale the images just a little bit in Retina mode, but I was able to work around that by creating a custom foreground layer for each cell that contains the image without scaling. Problem solved. Hopefully this will help someone else in the future.

Testimonial