Getting Eclipse and the Android emulator to play nicely with the MacBook Pro with Retina Display

I'm just getting used to my new MacBook Pro with Retina display, but ran into a few issues.

Making Eclipse Pretty

Initially, Eclipse wasn't rendering in the high DPI mode. It was still using "low resolution" and the text was blurred and scaled. To work around that until a proper fix comes from the Eclipse team, I use the work around suggested by Brandon Hudgeons from here:

Here's the workaround:

Do "Show package contents" on the Eclipse.app. Edit Contents/Info.plist. Just above

</dict>
</plist>

Place this:

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
<true/>

Then, log out or make a copy of the app so that OSX will notice the change. Now, the info window will not show "Open in Low Resolution" as checked. Launch Eclipse and enjoy your new retina awesomeness.

It worked like a charm for me. Note that if you've run Eclipse, OS X has possibly cached the Contents/Info.plist file and you may not see the changes. You can work around this by simply copying Eclipse.app, deleting the old Eclipse.app, and replacing it with the copied Eclipse.app.

The next issue, and the point of this post, was the Android emulator.

Fixing the Android emulator

Update! Today (14 Nov 2012) I noticed there was an update for the Android SDK. This update fixes the issues with the Android emulator. You no longer need to do this step if you update your Android SDK and ADT plugin. I'll leave this step here though for the heck of it.

When I ran the Android emulator, I noticed two problems. First, it was horribly slow. I mean unusably slow. I know it's not the fastest thing out there, but It took a couple minutes for it to just draw a "Hello world" activity I made, and don't even ask about interacting with it. The second problem was that it was 1/4 the size it should have been and looked like this:

Source: http://wheels.onebuttonapps.net/2012/07/android-emulator-and-the-macbook-pro-retina/

As some people mention, ADT 21 fixes this. Until it's properly released, though, you have to use the "Preview" version. Installation is pretty easy.

1. Uninstall your old ADT Eclipse plugin and install the preview version using the URL https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse-preview/
2. Check "Preview tools" in your Android SDK manager, like so:

Source: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=33383

Side note: Chrome's PDF preview and the Retina Display

Separate from these things, if you're noticing Chrome isn't displaying PDFs in high DPI either, go to chrome://flags and enable Enable high DPI Chrome PDF Viewer until they release a proper fix for it. Note it's an experimental feature, but I haven't had issues (yet).