Cocoa Scalable Interface for Digital Signage Display

Question

I'm working on a Cocoa application which will be used for a digital-signage/kiosk style display. I've never done anything like this with Cocoa before, but I'm trying to figure out what the best approach is for building the user interface for it.

My main issue is that I need a way to have the user interface scaled up or down depending on the resolution of the display. When I say scaled, I mean that I want everything including white space to maintain the same sizing ratio. The aspect ratio of the interface needs to remain the same (16x9), but it should always fill the entire width of the display its on.

Sorry if I'm not being descriptive enough.

What are some thoughts?

Answer 1

If I follow you correctly, you want all buttons and views, etc. to get larger, the bigger the screen is (which has nothing to do with the dimensions of your views). If that's the case, there's no automatic way to do this.

With Quartz Debugger (part of Xcode Tools), you can set the scaling factor (see "resolution independence"), but this would need to be manually adjusted per system. What's more is I'm not sure if this tinge is persistent across reboots. I leave that for you to investigate.

As far as I know, though, there's no way to adjust this programmatically as resolution independence is still not an exposed consumer feature of OS X.

Answer 2

If anyone is interested, I seem to have found a solution under this post: http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/02/asteroids-style-game-in-coreanimation.html