I thought I had my ios app icon all settled. I designed in Photoshop and tested in the prescribed sizes and it looks great (resizing in photoshop and saving to .png). I also tested via the "add to home screen" to see how it would look and looks nice and crisp (via a cool little webpage that lets you upload icon and bookmark on your device).
However, when I upload it as the large 1024 x 1024 icon (png) you do via iTunes Connect my shapes look all jagged. At least in the preview you get when initially getting ready to submit a new application.
Wondering what causes this and what I need to take into account as it pertains to how Apple resizes icons for delivery. Any help in pointing me in the right direction would be great.
What resolution did you design it in? If you designed it in Photoshop, it is a raster image and I would suggest you design in illustrator as a vector, but at the very minimum make sure your designed resolution is higher than the proportions required for the icon by Itunes.
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I should probably be asking this on some art website, but in my iPhone app I am trying to make a center button on my tab like the one Daily booth has, but mine is coming out fuzzy. Does anyone know how to make then clean and crisp? I used illustrator to create and save the icon as a png.
Try setting the image size to 30x30 and remember to only use black and transparency. You can make this bigger for the retina display.
Also, are you saving the image as grayscale?
If you're struggling to make them yourself, why not try glyphish.com?
I really like Paint.NET on Windows for image editing, mostly because it is free.
I noticed somebody had created an Effect for Paint.NET to create tab bar icons. I haven't tried it myself, so can't vouch for it in any way:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Plugins/iPhone-TabbarIcon-Maker-Alpha-from-RGB-Intensity.shtml
I've created some avatars from vector artwork and saved them as transparent PNGs. If I place the PNGs in interface builder, the quality is perfect. When I place them using code, the edges are horribly jagged, as if the AA has been removed, yet it's the same image. Is there any way to place them with code and maintain nice smooth edges?
I've attached a screenshot below with the iphone ver on the right.
Thanks,
Chris
Apple compresses pngs using a special optimization formula. It is possible that this formula is causing your images to alter from the original. If you notice a difference that you cannot live with, turn off the optimization by going into your target's info panel and unchecking the Compress PNG files option under the build tab.
I have the same experience with this kind of situation.
Also when I change the hardware to iphone 4 it seems to be really good. so my suggestion to u is that unless u transfer ur app to iphone dont relay on the simulator.
You cannot really tell what will be the result on iphone by referring to simulator.
so dont panic, just check the image on iphone first before you get to any conclusion.
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.
For example, preparing a launch screen of 320 x 480 would have to be changed....
How is that going to work for us? Are programmers always going to have to be submitting a high-res that will be scaled down for old devices such as the iphone 3g?
The size of the screen is basically 4 times on a pixel by pixel basis. So each pixel of your image for example gets boosted to 4.
What this means for you? You don't have to change your App, your app will scale to the hi res screen for you, same with your UI and images within your UI. Of course if you want to take advantage of the better screen quality you will have to submit hi res images.
I haven't looked at going the other way but I believe it would be a similar case.
One exception to this is text. It automatically scales to the higher res for you for free. So text will look super sharp. One problem with this is if your loading image has text based on the original load screen that wouldn't look the same as when the high res text loads.
Strictly speaking, anyone who's seen the documentation on how they're handling this is still under non-disclosure until Monday, when the new iOS ships.
Suffice to say, it's clever. You'll be able to put both high and low-rez versions of ALL your images into your app, and then load them into your app in a way that's totally transparent from the code side. The device will make its own call about which version of the image is appropriate for the kind of screen it's got.
Now that the WWDC 2010 videos are available for free to any registered iPhone developer (or ADC member), I recommend watching Session 134: Optimize your iPhone App for the Retina Display for a full description of what you need to do to support the iPhone 4's new display.
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.