base64 menu icon with Retina resolution

[JayBrown]

Using base64 for the menu icon works great… on Macs with legacy resolutions. But is there a way to use a higher icon resolution/size for Retina displays? (I tried by simply doubling the standard 18x18 size to 36x36, but it doesn't work.)

[mm2270]

@JayBrown Have you tried opening the image in Preview.app and changing the resolution to 144 pixels/inch prior to making the base64 data? Don't change the dimensions, just the resolution, from the default 72 to 144. That's what I've been doing and it seems to create a high res image for display in the menu for me.

Some examples. Below are custom icons I made for some menu plugins I'm working on. First one is how they both display on a Mid 2014 MBP Retina.

And how the same icons from the same plug-ins appear on a Mid 2012 MBP (with older display)

Quite a big difference, so it seems to work OK for me using the above technique. The OS simply scales the image resolution down accordingly when its being used on a non Retina system, so the trick is to create the image data with the higher display resolution (not size) in mind, and OS X will take care of the rest.

[JayBrown]

I've now encoded the icon at 144 ppi and 36x36 pixels. On my legacy display OS X automatically downscales to 72 ppi, which results in the necessary 18x18 pixels. I think that's what I was looking for. Thank you!

[JayBrown]

Retina works as well. Splendid.

[luckman212]

Having some trouble generating a "universal" base64-encoded PNG data that has the correct size on non-Retina displays. Can one of you guys post one of the ones that is working for you so I can play around with it?

[JayBrown]

This is one of the PNG data strings that worked on both Retina and older Macs:

iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACQAAAAkCAQAAABLCVATAAAACXBIWXMAABYlAAAWJQFJUiTwAAAAqklEQVR4nGL4z0AdSCVj4AZBqH8sMOF/ogz/Of4CRXjhIpxQEUm4CCNUlybcBITB/zhB1F9DJBEpsCYJhMhfE7AIO0LkZRjYDFQ3YvqXOBGCipR/Uckgqrlo1KBRg0YNGjVo1KBRg0aoQT8CEQL/uEAUSiNCGkQhNyL+mIJFOBAi0EYEUFABqokJJvdPCNqI4YKLsENFRBEOgepSxnQhBZBqBgEAAAD//wMA7zsOXl0uqHMAAAAASUVORK5CYII=

[JayBrown]

Generate actual png with echo -n "$base64_string" | base64 -D -o icon.png