I am new to UI design, however a client wants an app ready for both iPhone 4s & 5.
I understand the iPhone 5 will create two bars if the image is not long enough. Many people said coding it at #2x will solve the problem. But I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Do I need to design two versions? What happens if I design only for iPhone 5? Will iPhone 4S users see a squished screen?
Thanks.
First, in a couple of months you'll have to support the iPhone 5's screen size. Apple have announced that it'll be a requirement soon.
Adding a Default.png of the right size is enough to enable an app to support the new screen size but is likely not enough. You'll also need to make sure that all your views resize to fill the screen. There's the old "springs and struts" method and the newer "constraints." There are tutorials you can search for -- Stackoverflow is not a good place for that kind of thing. You'll also need to update any images.
In short, try it in the Simulator and see what happens.
Using #2x is referring to whether or not the image asset is being displayed on a 'retina' screen. For example, if you had a 50x50 pixel image, the 'retina' (#2x) version would be 100x100. This is because 1pt (point) is equal to 2px (pixel) on a retina screen.
There are a variety of ways you can determine is it is an iPhone5 or iPhone4.
In the viewDidLoad, you could check the self.view.frame.size.height to determine which background image to load based on the height of the screen. This would require you to have two different versions of the assets (not including #2x versions), i.e. bg_iphone5.png & bg_iphone4.png.
There are other ways to accomplish this, and people have explained it better than I have here - search StackOverflow and you will surely find what you're looking for.
What happens if I design only for iPhone 5? Will iPhone 4S users see a squished screen?
Don't do this. Design for both.
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How to detect iPhone 5 (widescreen devices)?
Do any adjustments need to be made for an app started in development prior to the iphone 5 in order for them to work on the iphone 5's larger screen?
If so, what are these changes, or where can I find what to change? google hasn't been too helpful so far.
Thanks
After adding the Default-568h#2x.png launch image, follow the steps outlined in this post:
How to develop or migrate apps for iPhone 5 screen resolution?
If you are having issues with the images being used INSIDE the app, and you want to support iPhone 5 and pre-iPhone 5 devices, use this:
Dealing with different size images in a xib for iPhone5 versus iPhone4?
You need to add a default launch images with 640x1136px named Default-568h#2x.png to support the iPhone 5 screen.
First, you have to have a 640x1136 launch image (with -568h#2x.png suffix) to make it compatible with the iPhone 5, but to fully make use of the larger screen, there are a many ways to do it. I find the easiest way to do it is to make two separate storyboards, making a new one for the iPhone 5, while maintaining the one you have already used for the iPhone 4S, 4, etc. Using two storyboards removes the necessity for AutoLayout; enabling AutoLayout, it is good to note, also removes iOS 5 compatibility. Use the code in this answer to get started.
Depending on how your app views are laid out, you may not need to make too many changes. If you have views that resize and are anchored correctly, such as scroll views or table views, they will expand to fill the additional space on the iPhone 5 screen. You need to add an additional launch image for the new screen size too.
the iphone 5's screen is taller so you'd need to have images with a resolution of 1136x640 also included in your images folder. (add -568h#2x at the end of image's filenames)
also, everytime you will adjust your sprites and everything else that goes on the screen, you will need to account for the iphone 5 separately, just like you account for the ipad and the iphone (non retina and retina).
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.
I've read the documentation and googled until I couldn't google anymore, but still I cannot figure out how to make my iPhone app use the higher resolution images when displayed in "2x" mode on the iPad.
I have Icon.png Icon#2x.png and Icon-72.png and they work fine, but I don't want to have to rename all of my images. Also, the "2x" just seems to scale up pixels so text and IB objects look terrible. Is there a fix for this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Note: This is not a universal app. I don't want to make it into a universal app. I just want it to scale up and look pretty on the ipad.
It is possible, at least in Cocos2D apps. Matt Rix does exactly this in his app Trainyard and it looks great on the iPad at 2x! He covers some of the details on his blog: Retinafy your Game.
Apple want you to write native iPad apps, so they deliberately don't support this, and there's no way to make it happen that I'm aware of.
You can register for the notification _UIClassicApplicationWillChangeZoomNotificationName and scale your graphics appropriately, i.e. by setting the rasterizationScale on the CALayer to the value returned by [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale].
I thought I read/saw/heard something saying that apps built for iPhone 4's Retina Display would automatically run at 640x960 when installed on an iPad. However, can't find any documentation on that specific feature, and my app still runs at 320x480 when installed on an iPad.
Is there a step I've missed to make this happen? Or did I just imagine this being a feature?
Apps do not auto-upscale, BUT if you have an image larger than the UIImageView you are placing it in, you will get as large a version as the iPad can draw.
I don't think it knows to pull in #2x images, just ones that are actually larger than the space you are placing them into.
This is not the case; currently, apps won't auto-upscale on an iPad. Perhaps Apple will add this in iOS 4.x for iPad, but certainly there's been no indication from them that they will.
i just have a 3gs for testing (here in romania i still cant get a iphone 4)
When I just create full screen images for iPhone 4 .. would they be displayed resized on the 3gs?
I just cant make a bundle version for 3gs and 4 with 2 times my images, they are already a lot. Do I have to make now 2 Apps ??
Could this be a trick: In my xib i define a 320x480 UIImageView (it will be resized automaticly on the iPhone4) when I there define "scale to fill" and make high resolution images, would they come more sharp on the iPhone 4?
Now I am just wondering how to work best right now for big animations.
thx
Just found out in my case its fine to use higher resolution pics into a 320x480 frame like for 3GS and make Aspect FILL.
When I test on a iPhone 4 Simulator it shows much higher resolution and same on iPad if I click 2x :)
you can also create alternative high resolution images with a name ending in "#2x". so if you have an image called "arrow.png", create one with twice the resolution called "arrow#2x.png" and the iphone 4 will use that.
check out this article: http://thomasmaier.me/2010/06/dealing-with-iphone-4-resolution-2x-inside-of-photoshop/
Try it and find out, but my suspicion is that even if they do work, they won't work on OS 3.0 or OS 3.1, and plenty of people have not upgraded yet.
Also note that even if it displays them at half-size, I'm pretty sure that they'll still be "#2x" images. This means they'll use more memory and generally perform worse.
What's wrong with adding a handful of new images? The normal-size images are a lot smaller than the #2x images.
EDIT: If you have a lot of images, you may find it beneficial to use JPEGs where appropriate (e.g. for photos or photo-like backgrounds). I'm not sure, but I think they should work with +[UIImage imageNamed:] though you might have to specify ".jpg" explicitly.