I do all of my app development (i.e. HTML/CSS in this case) on high-resolution devices--a macbook retina display, and/or a retina-ready 21" mac monitor. However, one of our 2 products is actually installed on an extremely low-quality 640x480 monitor.
The problem is in things like fonts, gradients, shadows, etc., that look great on a monitor built after the year 2001, but look like crap (too pixelated) on our lovely pre-WW2 device monitors.
(Ok, maybe not pre-ww2, but man, they really suck).
I already have a resolution switcher that makes it easy to resize my gigantic browser down to 640x480 PIXELS, but it's still in beautiful high-res form.
(edit): I realize what i'm asking about isn't resolution but is, instead, DPI.
Does anyone know of a method/plugin/app that I can run to emulate the horrible, crappy, not-so-good resolution/dpi of our devices?
This seems to be a good option:
http://www.browserstack.com/
Or maybe this could be what you need:
http://www.themobilewebdesignblog.com/2012/05/19/online-tools-emulators-for-responsive-design-testing/
Related
There are people who insist that for changing design from TFT to Retina we should redesign all app.
But I have read that we can change only app's images ,and it's enough.
I want to know which is the best practice for it and which solution is acceptable??
Retina Display is just Apple's name for the high resolution display on some of its devices -- it's still a TFT (thin film transistor) LCD display, though.
The Retina Display has twice as many pixels in each direction as the non-Retina version. iOS features a mechanism for providing both high resolution and standard resolution images, so that the high-res versions will be used if needed. All you need to do is include high-res versions of your images with the same names and their standard-res counterparts and the "#2x" suffix. Of course, having that higher resolution available means that you might want to add detail to your images or otherwise redesign your app to take full advantage of the screen's capabilities, but it's not a requirement. In fact, you don't need to do anything at all -- your existing app will work just fine without any changes.
It depends on your app.
In many cases simply including the hi-res versions of your images will be all that you need to do.
However, if you have any custom drawing that could benefit from the extra resolution, then you'll need to considered updating that code too.
I'm using some animated gifs on our mobile-site. It's a clock-animation and since the iOS 5 update it sometimes happens that the clock gets blue instead of red, as planned. Happens on iPhone4 and iPhone5 with the new os.
Any ideas what could cause the problems? It's hard to reconstruct this failure but it happens from time to time.
Any help would be appreciated.
Sometimes ios devices may not be able to process all the images because of its relatively low graphics ability compared to that of a computer. Instead of using a GIF I would suggest using an animated PNG. This has been more popular among the ios devices as using GIFs has become obsolete when working with ios devices. I am not sure how fast this would be, but I would say it can apply less stress then that of a gif. Another idea, because it is a clock gif is to analyze the gif in a program and determine any problems. Also use imgoptim (for mac) or pngcrush for windows to reduce the size of the gif to reduce the stress on the processor.
use GIF 128 Dither and Please make sure that images size has to be base on the resolution it happen some time if your images size is not depend on retina or normal resolutions. And if I am not wrong you facing problem only in retina device, may be below details will help
iPhone Retina Display
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Width - 640px
Height - 960px : including 40px status bar
DPI - 326
You can use Cocos2D framework, Cocos2d and UIKIT both work great with out any graphic related errors... Sprite sheets reduces the memory usage and also support all transparant images , you can run animation ,stop and repeat them. Good luck..
Images that I add to the layer in Cocos2d look pixelated around the edges of the image (i.e. a hillside, the rounded part of the hill, where the sky and the hill meet). I don't know if it's the image quality, or just because the graphics processor on my 'older' MacBook Pro is not as advanced as the iPhone 4 or iPod Touch 4 or iPad 2. Is it because of that?
I have ran into an instance where a large resolution image was being used in the context of a locally packaged HTML file in a UIWebView. The image looked fine in the simulator, but when ran on a hardware device, a bug was exposed in the rendering engine where it would invert the colors. Here's a bug report as an example of this. The solution was to scale the image down a bit in photo editing application.
While an extreme corner case, this is an example of the simulator not quite living up to how things will work on a hardware device.
The simulator usually does a pretty good job representing what the final image will look like. For the image quality on a normal computer to be worse than that of an iPhone for it to make a large enough difference, your MacBook Pro has to be really bad. So I doubt it.
However, if you really want to make sure, the best way to check would be to transfer the image you are using to another machine to see if it still looks pixelated. If it does, its a problem with your image.
Hope this helps and good luck!
Apple recommends cropping out the status bar from screenshots submitted to the app store. Doing this manually in Preview is a very tedious and error-prone process.
Do any developers have any best-practices recommendations or automated techniques for speeding up this process? The goal would be to take as input iPad and/or iPhone screenshots, and output them with the toolbar cropped off. We need to support both portrait and landscape orientation, and Retina-resolution iPhone screens.
I've found a few utilities online that purport to help with this, but the ones I have found seem to fail on Retina-display resolution screens. And another that works via the iOS Simulator requires a 1920x1080 resolution monitor to process iPad screenshots - making it useless for non-17" laptop-based developers.
Any other recommendations for taking good screenshots for the AppStore? I know (based on my searching) that there are a lot of other developers who would be interested in a quicker workflow to handle this.
Bonus points for being able to bulk-process an entire directory.
I developed a free App, Status Barred which is on the Mac App Store. It crops your iOS screenshots from iPhone, iPad, portrait, landscape, normal & retina display.
I used the ImageMagick command line tools to batch crop all the Screenshot png files, but haven't figured out how to not use auto assigned output filenames.
convert Screenshot*.png -crop 640x920+0+40 920Screenshot.png
Here are two ways, assuming you mean status bar and not toolbar (which you probably shouldn't crop out of the screenshots).
If you have photoshop, just change the canvas size by subtracting 20 (low-res) or 40 (retina) and anchoring the bottom of the image. This works perfectly.
It's also easy in iPhoto using the Edit/Crop feature. Set the dimensions to the correct size (Portrait: 320x460 or 640x920 and Landscape: 480x300 or 960x600) and move the crop screen to the bottom of the image. This does it perfectly as well.
After much searching, the easiest tool I have found is the iOS Simulator Cropper. It does a great job of handling different resolutions and orientations, and it is painless to use. No need to muck around with Photoshop or other slow / cumbersome tools.
Link: http://www.curioustimes.de/iphonesimulatorcropper/index.html
The developer reports that they have enhanced the iOS Simulator Cropper to bulk process screenshots taken on device as well as via the Simulator. I haven't tried this yet since the update, but if it works well this will be the perfect solution.
I have also found a very useful tool in the Mac App store called "Status Barred" that also very simply crops the status bar out of any images handed to it.
How about just using Preview? Command+A to select all, drag the selection down to 920px then Tools => Crop.
So I'm building an app for 4.x devices and I'm wondering if I can just use one set of assets at double resolution instead of one set with a #2x id and another set without.
Basically im asking can the older 3g and 3gs just use the #2x assets? and do the right thing with them?
anyone have experience with this?
Thanks
You're better off using two sets of resources, one for the high resolution retina displays and one for the older displays. Downsizing #2x graphics won't look pretty and will impact performance, especially on 2G iPod Touches.
The older devices can use the #2x but as far as I understand you'll need to:
Set your UIImageViews to scale the images to fit.
Hardcode image references to the new images.
Expect poor image quality and slower performance on non-retina devices.
Overall, it's better to provide two copies of the images, "bob.png" and "bob#2x.png" then reference them in code as "bob.png".
NB. As of iOS4 you can reference the images without their file endings, so just "bob" would work; however this has compatibility implications with devices running pre-iOS4 : the images won't be found. So for maximum compatibility include the file endings if you intend on deploying to both iOS4 and iOS3.x.
They technically can, given you make sure they're scaling the right way (e.g. if it's an image view that it's set to scale up/down).
However it's not recommended in most situations, mainly because it'll be slower, uses more resources, and leads to shorter battery life. Also, depends on your resources but an artwork scaled down by a factor of 2 doesn't have the same quality as one that is resampled specifically for the new size.