by Apple’s 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has a problem: OS X doesn’t allow users to easily take full advantage of the Retina display. Specifically, OS X doesn’t provide a simple, quick way to switch between the many supported screen resolutions; in addition, the Retina display supports higher resolutions than OS X provides access to. Fortunately, several developers offer software tools to fix this problem, and the one I’ve come to favor is Inertiactive’s QuickRes.
QuickRes 2.2 provides access to screen resolutions with a right-click on its menu bar icon.
QuickRes can appear in your Mac’s menu bar; a few other display utilities may offer a menu bar option, but OS X’s Displays system preferences doesn’t, and neither does a utility I previously used called Change Resolution. In addition to the standard five resolutions that are available in the Displays pane of System Preferences, QuickRes on the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro lets you access 22 additional resolution settings—for a whopping total of 27 available resolutions—including the native 2880 by 1800 resolution and two even-higher resolutions, 3360-by-2100 and 3840-by-2400. Right-clicking the QuickRes menu-bar icon shows you all of these resolutions, letting you quickly choose any of them.
Alternatively, a simple click of the QuickRes icon in the menu bar cycles through available resolutions—there’s no need to open an app, select a setting, and click a button to apply the chosen resolution. Similarly, a press of a configurable keyboard shortcut—by default, Command+Option+R—to switch resolutions instead of clicking the menu bar icon.
But you don’t have to cycle through all these options—you can choose up eight resolutions that are used for this cycling. For example, you could set up a three-setting sequence where the first resolution is 1024 by 640, the second is 1440 by 900 (or what QuickRes calls Best for Retina), and the third is 1920 by 1200. Whenever you click the QuickRes menu-bar icon or use the keyboard shortcut, you switch to the next setting in the sequence. If the display is at 1024 by 640 and you press Command+Option+R, the display switches to 1440 by 900. Press it again, and the display switches to 1920 by 1200. Press it again, and QuickRes goes back to the beginning of the sequence. (You can move only in one direction through the sequence, however.)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
