I have an icon in my app that looked ok on the simulator but wrong on my device; it was kind of "pale". It took me almost a month to figure out why, and the reason was a setting increasing the contrast of images. You can find it in the settings here:
Settings -> Accessability -> Display & Text Size -> Increase Contrast-switch.
I have several icons in my app but only one was affected by this, as far as I could see.
My question: Is there any way to ignore this so that the icon always looks correct?
The icon is black and render as default
You can provide images to be used when high contrast is enabled in the phone. To do that, select your image in Assets.xcassets and check High Contrast checkbox in the Attributes inspector. Then add the images to be used for high contrast.
Read more about it here.
You can test this from Xcode using Environment overrides menu.
Related
I'm using the Default.png method to create a splashscreen. I'm using the same file for my background and the Default.png (except default.png has the 20 pixel status bar at the top).
However, the iphone isn't displaying them in them the same. The Default.png is being displayed darker than the background, so it's painfully obvious when the app is loaded.
As a visual example of what I mean, please see below:
The image on left is the Default.png whereas the image on the right is when the app has loaded. The difference looks subtle here but when the whole image changes, it looks quite drastic.
Is this an issue with the colour-formatting of the pngs? Or is this an iOS feature whereby the Default.png appears slightly darker anyway?
It's probably not worth mentioning but I'm using Monotouch to develop my app, I doubt that would have anything to do with this.
I had a problem like this after editing a screenshot with OSX's Preview to cut out the status bar (as needed for iPad splashes). Preview sticked a color profile, and splash screen appears darker than the real thing in device.
If you open the image with GIMP, it shows a dialog offering to convert the color profile to SRGB. Take it (press "Convert") and save the image. This fixes the color difference.
Solved the problem. The designer sent me new versions of the backgrounds and the Default.png is now displaying the correct colour.
I have a feeling I had saved the previous version with a different colour profile to the background, hence why it was being displayed differently.
The iTunes Connect Developer Guide says that the developer must provide a whole bunch of different icon sizes. But I only know from the "normal" app icons (57x57, 114x114) that the device applies the gloss effect and corner rounding automatically.
But how about those other icons? How about the 512x512 iTunesArtwork.png icon? Are the effects applied automatically? Must this icon be shipped inside the bundle of the app? Is there any way to see it "live" how it finally looks, when those effects are applied?
I slightly remember that there was a tool from apple that applied those effects to an icon, so you could see them. Does anyone know more details about this?
The glow and rounded corners are applied automatically. You can control the glow, by adding a key to your Info.plist file: UIPrerenderedIcon set to YES will indicate that your icon is "prerendered" and you don't want the glow.
The AppStore will honor that setting for the 512x512 icon as well.
You actually should supply 6 icons now. One for the iPhone4, iPad, normal iphones/ipod touch, and 2 smaller icons for spotlight search (one is double resolution).
I wrote a pretty cool photoshop script to take you 512px icon and convert it using photoshop into 6 smaller sizes all named correctly.
http://github.com/sponno/iPhone-Photoshop-JSX-Icon-Exporter
You will also see in the header of the file, now to update your info.plist to include all these icons.
For more details on those six icons and their required sizes, here's two great resources:
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/708404794/ios-app-icon-sizes
http://blog.cocoia.com/2010/iphone-4-icon-psd-file/
Note that even though the app store honors the UIPrerenderedIcon setting for the icons supplied with your app bundle, the 512x512 icon submitted within iTunesConnect in the app management must not have rounded corners or gloss. If you click the ? next to the icon in iTunesConnect you get this message:
"A large version of your app icon that will be used on the App Store. It must be at least 72 DPI and a minimum of 512 by 512 pixels (it cannot be scaled up). It must be flat artwork without rounded corners."
Why they make it such a p.i.t.a. and make you provide a square icon for this is beyond me. My app icon is rounded with a decorative frame, this square version will look like a**.
I've taken a screenshot of my iPhone app running and I'd like to use that image as a png to be drawn by the app instead of generated graphics.
When I take the screenshot, it looks fine. However, when that is saved as a PNG file, added to the Xcode project and then displayed back on the screen of the phone (or simulator) the colours are different.
Can anyone explain to me why it's changing? (I'm guessing there's a colour space conversion happening).
How can I stop this from changing?
You might be saving the png image with some incorrect settings which is either reducing the quality or number of colors used. Try the PNG-24 with transparency to see if that helps at all.
I have read somewhere that the screenshots you send to Apple should NOT contain the status bar; however my app shows the status bar during runtime. After having a look around the App store I have noticed quite a few app screenshots contain the status bar.
So my question is... Is including the status bar in application screenshots a "rejectable" offence? NB The Google App screenshots contains the status bar so I am guessing no...
Many thanks!
According to the iTunes Connect Developer Guide (PDF available once you're logged into your dev account):
iPhone and iPod touch:
Portrait: 320x460px min, 320x480px max
Landscape: 480x300px min, 480x320px max
"Please do not include the iPhone status bar."
iPad:
Portrait: 748x1024px min, 768x1024px max
Landscape: 1004x768px min, 1024x768px max
"Please do not include the iPad status bar."
Although as Noah has pointed out this is routinely ignored by developers and by Apple reviewers.
I've not had any apps rejected for showing the status bar in screenshots.
As near as I can tell, the only effect of not cropping out the status bar in the default image is that Xcode presents a small yellow warning label over the image thumbnail in the target's summary pane.
If this annoys you and you decide that you want to crop out the status bar, it's surprisingly hard to do this without distorting the colours. That's a disaster, since it introduces a visual discontinuity in the transition from the default image to your running code.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is because the on-device screenshot produces an unusual PNG without any embedded color profile, while almost any tool you use to crop (like Preview) will insist on adding some color profile. Then your cropped PNG gets further modified by Xcode's optimisation when it builds the IPA bundle, so it's tricky.
The only solution I found was to do the crop using ImageMagick's utility "convert". For instance, to crop the 20px status bar from an iPad-1 landscape screenshot of 1024x768 to get a default image of 1024x748, you do:
convert infile.png -crop 1024x748+0+20 outfile.png
You can use "identify -verbose" on a file and see all the other changes most other image editing tools are making by default.
If you've seen it in multiple different apps, you're probably okay with including it. I leave it out of my own because it looks cleaner, but you're not likely to get rejected for failing to crop your screenshots.
it doesnt seem clear. their docs say Do Not Include Status Bars, so that's probably the best answer. However, it seems alot of apps don't follow that rule and are listed in App Store. some claim they are removing that "No Status Bar" restriction. Until then, best bet is to follow the docs.
here's a handy tool, just drag all your full size (with status bar) screenshots and it'll crop em for u.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/status-barred/id413853485?mt=12
so wonder is it need to be the same picture?
it can use difference picture ?
(Edited)
In link text stated:
When you submit your application, you
must include a 512 x 512 pixel version
of your application icon for display
in the App Store. Although it’s
important that this version be
instantly recognizable as your
application icon, it should be subtly
richer and more detailed. In other
words, you should not simply scale up
your application icon to create an
icon for the App Store.
So I think from this follows that you can make cosmetic changes to your picture to make it look better in good resolution.
In our app we do the reverse thing - we create 512x512 artwork and use its scaled to 57x57 variant as application icon.